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| Z00 Gas
Zoo Gas is a game that attempts to pose a familiar question in computational ecology -- how are complex food webs stabilized? -- as a real-time game mechanic (Wikipedia) .
Formally, Zoo Gas is an entropy-maximizing game of population-balancing and (highly simplified) natural selection, set on a cellular automaton model of the Lotka-Volterra equation (Wikipedia) .
The underlying engine is a general-purpose, peer-to-peer reaction-diffusion simulator with a string-rewriting language based on regular expressions (Wikipedia) , and inspired by Core Wars (Wikipedia) .
Availability
Zoo Gas is open source: all code is available, including code of past prototypes, in the git repository:
Browse the current rule file here:
ECOLOGY.txt
Current version
The latest prototype can be found in the following directory:
Prototypes
Past prototypes, starting with the original one-day jam:
- The Chaos Zoo : fast, frantic, cyclic ecology with no level structure
- Inner Sanctums : a slower pace, a simple level: animals in cages, guests at the perimeter. also basic peer-to-peer networking over UDP/TCP. At the code level, major refactoring toward file-based configurability including a regex-based minilanguage, a tool file, and the level design
- Topologies : Here's where I experiment with the three simple 2D topologies (4-neighbor von Neumann, 6-neighbor hexagonal & 8-neighbor Moore). I'm sticking with Moore for now because it's the most expressive, and as an added bonus/hack, can be indirectly constrained to von Neumann using the regex rule syntax ('nw','se' etc are 2-character dirStrings, but 'n','s' etc are 1-character)
Future plans:
- Tool/game config file (separate logic & design)
- Level-building miniprograms
- Peer-to-peer exchange of miniprograms
Copyright and licensing
Zoo gas is a free product of the Evolutionary Software Foundation.
It is released under the GNU Public License. version 3.
Disclaimers
Nothing is guaranteed to work on your machine, etc. Sorry. Seriously. |
