The Random Run

Well, LNA has been running fairly nicely for a week now. In an attempt to better the performance I reformatted the hard drive and while I don't know if I see a notable difference in the stream, the computer itself is much easier to work with now.

Progress has been slow but steady on BattleStance. I have added in the overlays, CAs, CA linkers, and have worked a little on the sprites for the fruit meant to grow on the tree. In experimenting with norns in the room though, I am worried that I may have made the lifts too large-- in some of the smaller rooms, they seem to grab every norn into it, willing or not-- and because they move so fast, if one norn is insistant on pulling the lift and the other on pushing, the lifts end up bouncing up and down for quite a time. As much of a pain as it was to do those lifts I am seriously considering reworking them.

There's been a lot of chatter over at Creaturetopia about CCSF '09. A couple of polls finally set this year's festival date for November 1st-14th-- partly in honor of the ten-year anniversary of Creatures 3, which was released on November 1st, 1999. Now there's a bit of dicussion about the potential theme. It's nice to see so much enthusiasm. I have high hopes for this year.

With the required updates out of the way, I'd like to make mention of a new sort of wolfling run I'm trying out. I'm calling it a "random run" and essentially beginning it with this block of code injected eight times:

new: simp 3 4 1 "eggs" 8 0 2000

pose 0
attr 195
bhvr 32
elas 10
fric 100
aero 10
accg 4
perm 60
gene load targ 1 "*"
setv ov01 0
tick 900
mvto 443 9167
anim [0 1 2 3]

It is a generic egg-injection script-- but the bolded line ensures that a completely random genome is injected into the egg. I have recently downloaded just a ton of new breeds and thought this would be an interesting way to test drive them.

It looks like the initial line-up consists of some chichis, an astro, a fallow, a harlequin, a couple plant norns, and a weird purple bengal. Not as many of the strange new breeds as I initially hoped, but randomness will have to take its course for the sake of the run rules.

I intend on letting the run go on until the population is mostly homogenous. Nothing special is being done to accomodate those norns with special needs-- the resulting genetic sample needs to be able to survive and breed normally in a typical DS world. I've rigged up the egg finder with the timer in the workshop and killed all teleporters as I do for all my runs, but other than than the world is virtually untouched. Nature will take its course now.

On a somewhat related note, I would like to do a few experiments on norn adaptation in different metarooms. It would take a while, and the results may or may not produce anything, but it might be interesting to try.

I would run several feral runs... perhaps five for each room. Starting with normal chichis, and letting them run until generation 100 or so, then comparing genetic samples to see how much they differ from each other and the base chichi genome. In theory, the norns within the same run would differ very little from each other, but differ some from the norns in different runs within the same metaroom, just due to the randomness of evolution. But theoretically, the norns from all runs done in one metaroom would differ quite noticabley from norns raised in another metaroom, because they have had to adapt to different enviroments.

I'm not sure if 100 generations is really enough for the genome to settle though. And I'm not even sure if the difference in metaroom enviroments would cause the genome differences to be greater than the sheer randomness of mutations that take place in separate colonies. But eh... that's what experiments are for, right? To prove or dispprove theories.

But I'll file that away in my nice little idea folder for now. As if I don't have enough projects to keep me busy!