Bay 12 Games Forum

There is a difference between working in general and working in a way that makes for good gameplay.  What gamers actually want is progress, which the ignorant think is the same thing as evolution.  They want things to get better, faster, stronger, cleverer etc over time because that makes them happy.  What evolution actually ends up producing is things like whales, creatures that have lungs rather than gills despite living in the water and dying if they try to leave it. 

So the fish evolved lungs to live on the land and lost their gills.  Then said land-animals evolved back into something that looks like a fish but has no gills; so overall they ended up worse off than they were to begin with.  Gamers do not want a game where the outcome of successful gameplay is they are worse off than if they never played the game in the first place, but that is a common outcome of the evolution-game.

The evolution for the game idea in my head has little to do with absolute progress. I'm personally more interested in the interesting alterations the creatures would go through when exposed to wildly varying environments and conditions. I would be ecstatic to discover a land animal slowly changing into an aquatic form or vice versa.

My goal is to have the aspects of the creatures' bodies and behavior change and adapt in a natural feeling way. The mutation rates can be fiddled with to speed up or slow down the rate of diversification if needed.

Such a game, if it would even be game at all, might not be fun for most people. It's just an idea I have a personal investment in. Even if I must keep 95% of traits hardcoded and fixed to get good results, I'll be satisfied.

I think the idea has most merit for games with a few parameters that the developers are unsure of. Maybe in a strategy game different groups can evolve certain traits such as an inclination to build defenses rather than focus on attack power alone or preferring certain weapon types over another. This has the possibility to improve or diversify the AI of games. I have seen projects that use evolutionary algorithms to auto balance strategy games. There is a lot of untapped potential here.

I just asked about it in Future of the Fortress. I'll have my fingers crossed. If Tarn isn't interested I might make my own game to try it out, although I'll probably do that anyway. I've never seen a game do evolution justice, but we might have to wait for quantum computers to come up to speed.

I think the time scale may not be as big of an issue as you might think. Here is an article about rapid evolution of fish: https://phys.org/news/2009-06-evolution-years.html
I've done a few evolution simulations of my own and I've seen significant changes even in the course of a day. My simulations are quite different than what Tarn would likely implement, but I think they give support that this could be viable.

I can think of a few situations that might yield very fast evolution. Maybe an isolated area that becomes flooded up to 5 and a half feet. Most of the shorter people might drown or find life much more difficult than taller people who could walk through the water. This situation seems a bit contrived, but any significant environmental change that kills or hampers some of the population can lead to very fast changes in the gene pool.

People born with powerful magical ability would have much better survival rates than mundane people. I think this could lead to populations with very strong magical talents or maybe even magic resistance to survive.

All this may very well be out of the scope Tarn has in mind for Dwarf Fortress, but I think it would lead to interesting cases.

That is game breaking for me. I'll have to stick with fortress mode.

I recently played Dwarf Fortress for the first time in adventure mode. While playing I noticed that none of the NPC characters in buildings moved. Are they forever static or will they move eventually?

If it did change, how advanced is the simulation now? Is it on par with the world generator or is it simplified?