New abilities
I fixed a bug that prevented them from using the signal/communication system. So now you'll be seeing a lot more signaling than they did before. As reminder, the way this works is that they can write three floating point numbers to the location they're standing on. Those numbers persist until another agent re-writes them. Any agent nearby can read the numbers from that location.
Also, I gave all the agents memory. Twenty of their outputs are saved and then fed back in as inputs the next turn.
In both cases I haven't figured out if they're using those features. Even if they are saving data to memory and communication, it could be just noise.
The new UI
The new UI shows a lot of things. For starters, I sized the world down to 200x200 and then made the UI map 600x600 so it's easier to see what each individual agent is doing.
I also gave them shapes that represent their decisions. So a 'C' shape is attacking, 'O' is replicating, '+' is growing, 'x' is turning, '^' is moving. I made the growing/turning/moving shapes small and the attacking/replicating shapes big because I want to highlight those less common activities.
The speciation is also dramatically improved. Before I'd parse their brains and then make species judgement from that. Now I just simply give an agent a number, when they replicate their spawn gets that number + or - 1. It turns out most of the time there's so much selection going on, the current generation is only 10 or 20 generations from having a single common ancestor. Thus, the numbers stay quite tight around a species. I then simply map that number to a color to make it easy to see.
This speciation improvement also made parsing species stats a lot easier. You'll notice the system now differentiates and gets statistics on predatory behaviour far easier.
To find out if creatures are using some feature You can at some point turn off that feature for half of population and see what happened after that.
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