I’ve been interested in this project for a long time. I love the state it is in right now and it is obviously much more fleshed out and complex, however I still want to mess around with the gloops and thwogs I saw in those early videos.
They were just so silly and I was wondering if there is any way to download early versions of Grandroids, or if maybe I could contact the busy man Steve Grand himself and the likelihood he would send them to me, although I understand why not since it is gated behind a subscription now. Just mainly want to mess with a gloop like I wanted to 10+ years ago XD
I wish I was a kickstarter backer but I was a child back then, and as someone who is extremely interested in artificial life and emergent intelligence I just like seeing things even if from an outsiders perspective its goofy, to me its wildly interesting.
here is a conversation about the older versions https://phantasia.life/community/main-forum/to-all-kickstarters/paged/2/#post-61
i found it by searching “trust” because that is the main issue, steve had a lot of notes in the old builds. Probably the main reason why the old builds aren’t listed as downloads.Â
I don’t think I have any gloops any more. Sorry! One problem I have is that the project source files are currently something like 100GB for every copy I keep, and the other is that Unity keeps producing new versions, making my old code incompatible, and I’d have to keep dozens of old Unity instances installed. So basically, I keep multiple backups until I’m ready to publish a new build, and then I delete almost everything and work from the newly clean build version. It’s a bit scary deleting backups, but I’d need many terabytes of storage if I didn’t.Â
I will be putting some throgs in the game eventually, though! And I see you’ve just joined as a supporter, so thank you! I’ll be around to chat about artificial life again soon, if I can only catch up with all the changes in Unity for a bit 🙂
Ugh! It’s horrifying that the gloops go back ten years already and I haven’t finished it yet! Where did my life go??? 🙂
@steve Thanks for the reply! Never really thought I’d be talking to you but awesome!! That’s ok with me and totally understandable! I never really thought about the space the source files must take. But those ten years have been spent making something both incredible and insanely unique and interesting to a large niche of people, everything you done has been thought provoking and being someone who loves artificial life you are one of my main idols in the field. I love your philosophy and everything I’ve read from you has always been awe inspiring.Â
Also I see you have been in some troubles as of recent and I am wishing you feel rejuvenated and well soon, what you’re doing is very complex and nobody expects you to get it done anytime soon. We see the progress you have made and that’s enough for me at least.Â
(P.S. Also, sorry to add a question to this already very long reading, but I’ve noticed the comb/brush isn’t working and crashes my game, can’t find any info but was just wondering if this is the norm as of now! Thanks so much!)
Thank you! I appreciate the encouragement! It’s been quite a struggle, tbh, but I do think I’m making something kinda cool. Wait until you learn about the brain stuff – I’m pretty sure that’s quite unique and may be important. You saw it here first! 🙂
Yep, the brush is broken, although I didn’t realize that it crashes the game. Walking around is pretty broken too. There will be many, many bugs for a while. Especially in the next version, which should be here quite soon. But we’ll find them and smoosh them over time. Once I feel like it’s not too unstable, I’ll add a bug reporting forum for you all to record them in, but for now it’s bound to be a bit of a mess.
@steve Completely understandable, I used to love poking into the brains of Norns in Creatures, that was really what got me interested in neural networks and then everything else artificial life/AI. I love what you do, and I truly wish you the best of luck!
