Simulating Natural Selection in videogames (self posted) - General

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXcXJvvpOmg&feature=youtu.be If anyone has any other cases of simulated evolution being used in cool ways in videogames I would love to hear about it. It's stuff like this that helped get me to fall in love with Biology to begin with.

That is definitely a bit of a niche/odd thing to make a video about but it reminds me of

I think the strangest evolution that I have watched, was the evolution of Garry's Mod building, and namely the introduction of Wiremod. Started out with things that need five or more players to control, and now we have players who make their own games within stuff like Expression 2. It's strange.

It is but it is something I really enjoy playing with and it's sad to me that to my knowledge Creatures is really the only game with a big budget that uses these features. The technology to implement a form of natural selection in other games as a form of learning or environment response has been around for years but and it such a cool concept but has only really been looked into by small one man indie devs.

Did anybody play that sims animals game on the wii or something where environmental factors affected the animals?

This is pretty neat. I certainly have not given any thought to using self-evolving enemies to "organically" shift the meta. I'd be really interested to see how players deal with meta where resources get increasingly difficult to obtain (in your pig example). Would there be some sort of self-enforcement so that easy to kill pigs would be hunted in some limited fashion while tougher pigs were sought out to cull them? etc

It's not simulationist enough to try to replicate mutations and natural selection, but I feel Rain World does a fantastic job of simulating fantastic eco-systems. By encouraging AI to interact in natural ways both inside and outside of the player's view and using procedural pathfinding (see the video below), the game feels less like a straight adventure game and more of a dangerous sandbox with goals and immersion-friendly creatures. It's definitely worth picking up if you like seeing AI animals doing animal things. https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/002/919/681/8bf15868aeaf76998235e351ae7d847d_large.gif https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVntwsrjNe4

That is actually really cool and while I have seen gameplay of Rainworld I had no idea it was simulating an entire ecosystem. I am suddenly interested. On another note this game also simulates ecosystems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrtZf1lYLPY

No but I played Sim earth which if done today could be pretty close to OPs dream game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2qr4N-24js

While STALKER's A-Life was nowhere near complicated enough to be seen as natural selection or complicated AI of sorts, it did allow a naturally-feeling bunch of interactions between human NPC's and mutant NPC's. There were a bunch of things that could happen at any point and it feels great because it means you're just part of the Zone instead of being a direct influence. It was pretty immersive.

Sim earth was great. It's sad that it didn't become as huge as a hit as Say Sim City or The Sims since it had so much potential.

This guy has made a few Evolution Simulators from Scratch and they even have a decent amount of views https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOFws_hhZs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMQoLtBJcl8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAQNiL3o5lU

The last one if the most interesting to me. Sad that he eventually gave up on it but seeing those different behaviors and the creatures glitching/exploiting the system was really cool.