Thursday, May 28, 2009

A Little World

I've ended up with an odd desire to run some sort of continuous simulation of some sort on a spare computer. I was thinking some kind of community/city simulator that can be left alone for extended periods of time. Of course, other simulations are welcome. Any suggestions?

5 comments:

Dunc said...

Dunno what sort of simulation you're interested in, but I used to run CPDN. I still think it's amazingly cool that you can run a proper GCM on a desktop PC...

Joshua said...

I know exactly what you mean. Like a SimCity or Dwarf Fortress that runs itself, yeah?

Nobody's written one that I'm aware of, though. Sigh.

Bronze Dog said...

Yeah. I recently watched a long, thorough Dwarf Fortress tutorial. I like the level of detail involved in DF, but the micromanagement is a bit much.

One concept that comes to mind: "City" of buildings that arrange and shape themselves according to evolutionary algorithms. Maybe I should see if there's an easy way to throw something like that together.

Joshua said...

The annoying bit is that some of these games come really close. The way SimCity, for instance, adapts its neighbourhoods over time to account for traffic flow, changes to the surroundings, and random factors is very interesting and non-deterministic. You'll see buildings built and destroyed and rebuilt even if you don't change the zoning or bulldoze anything.

But the really interesting part would be if there was a mechanism that dynamically altered the zoning rules and laid down transportation and infrastructure without user input. It'd make for a terrible game, maybe, but a really cool simulation.

Valhar2000 said...

Well, there is a program somewhere that will create random collections of primitives that are attached to each other in specific ways and move rythmically. It then simulates how these collections of shapes would move if they were dropped on a floor, and the ones that manage to move forward the most distance are seelcted.

Apparently, you can end up getting shapes that gallop and prance about like real life animals, and yet they are nothing more than primitives oined together and animated by simple harmonic motion.

I tried it once, but it takes a while to get anything interesting, so you woudl need to have a spare computer that you can leave running for a few days at a time.