Build 0.1.0.

Phew! Sorry it’s been so long since I last updated the build – I really thought I’d be able to keep a good cadence going by now, with frequent small updates to keep people engaged. But this one turned out to be a huge amount of work. Reworking the user interface was a massive task with lots of tendrils reaching deep into the code, and there was no point putting out a build until it had a functioning UI!

The new downloads are available through the dashboard, and I’ve named the new build version 0.1.0, rather than 0.0.4, since it’s quite a big update and deserves a bigger number! Almost all of the changes in it are UI-related. I’ve also fixed various biology and simulation bugs as I went, but there aren’t very many changes to the creatures this time round. Their attention and emotional systems should be a bit more reliable now, though, because I changed the way that the neurons in the affect layer learn. Funnily enough, I went back to a technique I’d invented 30 years ago, for Creatures, even though that project was nowhere near as sophisticated and worked in a completely different way. Sometimes the old ideas are still the best!

After a hard day of slaving over a hot frame profiler, I’m getting 70-80fps on my mid-range PC (RTX3060), in both Windows and Linux (the Mac is anybody’s guess, since I don’t possess a Mac). So I’m pretty pleased with that. But there is quite a significant slow-down going on at the moment, whenever there are creatures in view of the camera. Even if they’re far away and hidden behind other things. I don’t know what’s causing it yet – I think it might be their hair – so for now I’ve set the system to only create two to four creatures. Otherwise the inexplicable slow-down will subconsciously make it feel like the new UI is to blame. I’ll work on it.

I actually had a brilliant idea overnight that should fuel some much-needed gameplay, but I won’t tell you what it is until I’ve thought it through more carefully. I don’t trust my 3AM thoughts until they’ve been subjected to the Cold Light of Day for a while! Hopefully I can put out a new build fairly quickly next time, and then you’ll be able to see for yourselves.

Anyhow, I’ve changed a lot of stuff and probably broken quite a bit of it in the process, because there’s far more to user interfaces than… you know… the user interfacey bits. So do let me know what bugs you find. I only have one computer here, so I’d be interested to know how it feels to you, running on your particular system and screen resolution. How many FPS are you getting (type “WATCH ME” to find that out)? Is the mouse too twitchy? Not twitchy enough? Do you turn too quickly? Walk too slowly? Does the head movement need smoothing? I haven’t had time to pay any attention to these finer points, yet. The ability to do things at all comes first, and then doing them well can be sorted out later.

All of these factors can be tuned to your liking, btw, via the new UI. Type “SET MY WALKSPEED”, “SET MY TURNRATE”, etc. Each of these settings expects a number between -1 and +1, where 0 means the default setting, negative numbers make things less sensitive, and positive ones are more sensitive.

If you’ve no idea what the new UI is even about, you’ll find a video walk-through in this blog post. It should be pretty self-evident, though: Mouse to look and turn, WASD to move, Q to sit on or in things, SPACE to jump, SHIFT to do all these things faster. The important new key is TAB, to open and close the notebook (CTRL-TAB switches pages, 1234 selects tools, but these are just optional shortcuts).

Um, I think that’s all I meant to tell you. The UI is still quite rough around the edges – it’s just a first draft of many. But I have a million other urgent things to work on now, so be patient with me. It’ll all come together in the end. It always has before.

In the meantime, please like and subscribe. Oh, well, I guess you can’t. But thank you to those of you who’ve quietly signed up for the paid tier so far. I appreciate your support more than I can say. My anxiety levels are absolutely through the roof right now, and I really need every bit of support I can get. So thank you to everybody who feels able to help.