Biodiversity

[stripwax]

Updated version. Updates on the first post of this thread.

[stripwax]

My idea was "I wonder if I can make a skeletal object system? Cool, let's test it with a tree. Wow, it works. Hey, if I make each bone get bigger over time in a certain way, I can make it grow! Awesome! Hm, I wonder if I could tweak the tree-generator with a table of parameters - a genetic code, if you will. Yes! Hey, wait, if I could make a way to merge two sets of genes, I could actually breed these plants...".

Wow, quite a different approach indeed! Your game (even on the lowest complexity/graphics settings) seems pretty taxing for my netbook unfortunately. I have a couple of questions/suggestions for yours. I found it very hard to see where my mouse pointer actually was, it just seems to be where the text is but that's quite pale on a pale background, you only get the circle if you happen to be over a plant? Secondly I couldn't work out how to view what the genotype of any given plant was - is that correct (it has to be entirely guessed/figured out experimentally from the phenotype and offspring combinations)? If so yours is way more challenging than mine.

[JDFight]

This is a very cool gameplay concept - The world definitely needs more games like this - The gameplay is very intuitive too - unlike other overly complicated genetics/ breeding games I have played in the past -

Audio is unfortunately garbled on my system - everything sounds like distorted white noise - It is probably the machine that I am playing on - Not many people using powerpc linux machines these days... I'll give it another try on my work machine when I have a chance.

also, I received a random crash from audio_handler.lua line 16 - "expected userdata" - probably trying to index a sound that is not there.

[stripwax]

This is a very cool gameplay concept - The world definitely needs more games like this - The gameplay is very intuitive too - unlike other overly complicated genetics/ breeding games I have played in the past -

Thanks! I plan to continue developing the idea further!

Audio is unfortunately garbled on my system - everything sounds like distorted white noise - It is probably the machine that I am playing on - Not many people using powerpc linux machines these days... I'll give it another try on my work machine when I have a chance.

also, I received a random crash from audio_handler.lua line 16 - "expected userdata" - probably trying to index a sound that is not there.

Curious. Someone else also reproted to me the crash in audio_handler, but after they redownloaded the .love file the crash went away. I suspect a corrupted download here. Alternativelt try renaming the .love to .zip and confirm whether it's a valid zipfile or not.

As for the whitenoise - assuming you get correct audio in other Love games - I suspect an endianness bug in either libvorbis or Love's handling of libvorbis - should be easy to confirm on your system (and file a bug accordingly!). There's nothing funky about my game code for audio, other than I'm using ogg vorbis which is maybe less well tested.

[JDFight]

Yep - I downloaded the version from your website and the audio crash went away - though the audio glitches still persist.

- I figure that the sound glitches I experienced are likely caused by some weirdness in my system - My system is a bit on the fringe when it comes to compatibility (powerpc g4 powerbook running Debian squeeze) - I can't even play most .love games here because my graphics card requires power of 2 texture sizes - Most games end up just showing me white blocks where graphics should be - I was very pleasantly surprised to see that Biodiversity actually worked for me!

Oddly, I can play the ogg files in your .love with no issues - I'll look into libvorbis - I may need to build a newer version from source... I think it might also be an issue with libsdl -

[stripwax]

Yep - I downloaded the version from your website and the audio crash went away

Actually, I did find a bug that would likely cause what you saw. Pretty stupid coding bug on my part.

Updated version (updated details in first post).
The new updated version fixes that audio handler bug, I think, for good. It also saves the highscores! I actually had to fix bugs in TSerial, booh.. it generated unparsable Lua code in the cases where table keys had embedded quotes or brackets :-(

- I figure that the sound glitches I experienced are likely caused by some weirdness in my system - My system is a bit on the fringe when it comes to compatibility (powerpc g4 powerbook running Debian squeeze) - I can't even play most .love games here because my graphics card requires power of 2 texture sizes - Most games end up just showing me white blocks where graphics should be - I was very pleasantly surprised to see that Biodiversity actually worked for me!

.
My machine is a pretty-limited Intel (Atom) netbook - with no recent opengl drivers, no support for framebuffers, power-of-2 requirements, the whole lot. I'd be surprised if there's anything out there that can run FEWER .love games than my machine :-)

Oddly, I can play the ogg files in your .love with no issues - I'll look into libvorbis - I may need to build a newer version from source... I think it might also be an issue with libsdl -

Yep, could be. If you can track something down, it would be worth raising a ticket.

[stripwax]

A couple of minor (ish) updates, first post updated. The Challenge 1 level had the mutation mechanism enabled, it wasn't supposed to be (hence why the level popup says 'no mutation'! :-) ). Turning off mutation should make it a bit easier to get a high score if you really nail it right from the start.

[stripwax]

Just a minor update for compatibilty with 0.8.0 (seems it is (quite rightly) more strict, and one of my requires was broken). First post and links updated.

[Nixola]

Didn't notice this game earlier, I can't complete the 3rd tutorial too; the game seems nice, though

[stripwax]

Nixola - interesting - I guess level 3 is where things generally start to make use of the idea of genetics. Levels 1 and 2 are really pretty basic. Did you try levels 4 and up (they're not locked, you can play them in any order).

I intentionally did not describe the function of the tooltips that hover over flowers but that's really where they secrets lie - how many combinations of filled and empty boxes are there, and what does each one do, and how can you influence the outcome of a new plant by breeding different parents..
(HINT: don't use the bottom-right flower for breeding. Why not?)