The News that’s Fit to Print

Posted in: Evolution Simulation, General News, Wednesday Update | January 30, 2013 | No Comments

I’m back with another installment of the weekly update.  What’s that you say, it has been two weeks?  Sure, in *your* reference frame.  So aside from running around a lot (near c), I’ve been:

Some General Updating

I gave a quick, minor facelift to several projects.  You might notice the website is a bit shinier (oh, you didn’t?  Curses!)  Well, maybe you notice the improved graphics in Agent Higgs: Chapter 1 (the flash game)?  No?  How about the further polish I’ve added to Velocity Raptor?  (Side note, which punctuation will I use more, parenthesis or question marks?)  In any case, a bunch of small changes.  It’s nice to clean up the projects every now and then.  No ulterior reason for doing that now.  Nope.

They can Walk!

I’ve worked a bit on the evolution simulator, mainly focusing on a side-part of it.  The sim is generally about evolving stick-and-motor organisms to run faster and better.  However, it grew out of a long ago thought I had about whether a stick figure could ‘learn’ to ‘walk’.  That turns out to be a lot harder.  I wasn’t having much luck with simple human-shaped stick-and-motor creatures.  It was tough enough to convince them to try to walk (I guess an evolutionarily advanced way for us to move is to flop around on the ground.  Try it.  It must be very energy-efficient.)  Once I turned the floor into lava, though, they avoided dunking their heads in it, but they still had trouble loco-moting.  And that’s of course for a whole bunch of reasons — namely the simplicity of the simulation and the small populations I was dealing with.  So I shelved it for a while.

But, I made some good progress past that, this week.  I made the humans slightly more advanced to start with – building in some basic coordination.  Move both legs at the same time.  Move with some rhythm.  That kind of thing.  And so far the results are promising.  But hey, a tiny, grainy gif is worth a thousand words:

Click the image to see a gif of this trial run

Higgs Returns?

Well, kind of.  It’s been a while since I released the suggestively titled flash game, Agent Higgs: Chapter 1.  So I’ve been pulling together the follow up.  It is based on the next section of levels in the iOS game, about the neutrinos.  So if you’ve been pining for more Higgs, and you don’t have apple devices, get ready!  More physics puzzles will be heading your way soon!

It’s Electric

And to round out this wildly scattered weekly update, I’ve also been working quite a bit on that electromagnetism game I showed off last time.  The basic pieces are starting to come together, with some fun levels – and the ever abundant physics curiosities (wait, you shouldn’t be able to fly through a wall like that…!).  The graphics are a big improvement from last time.  I mean, you can see the determination in the main character’s eyes:

The blue is a magnetic field protruding from your screen. The red is crushed dreams.

(You have to look very close to see the emotion.)  So that’s that for this week.  Stay tuned over the next couple days, I have a nice Friday Fun coming up!

-Andy