I've been thinking about some other a-life programs out there that needs a lot of improvements. It seems to me that this a-life business goes damn slow and I get frustrated that it's so difficult to find any good ones. Has anybody here heard about El-Fish? It was allmost impossible to get it but after many hours of searching on the web I managed to find this link:
http://www.antiqueclockshop.com/virtual/elfish.htmIt's an abandonware and you can download it for free if you want to check it out.
There are 3 things that makes this the best aquarium simulation software out there.
1. You can evolve fishes with different kinds of shapes and colors.
2. You can create unique plants for your aquarium.
3. You can create your own tank with lots of different stuff to put in.
But otherwise the fishes are just animations that swim around in the same way and they don't need to eat or sleep, and they can't reproduce. Also there is a compatibility issue with todays computers with fast processors, wich limits the amount of fishes you can put in the aquarium. For instance I could only put 1 big fish and only 4 small fishes in my aquarium. Sucks! So it gets boring after a little while. The only fun part was to try and make a fish look like some real species. I managed to create this one. It looks like a swedish species called Abborre, wich I guess you call Bass in USA. I'm not sure. (See screenshot)
Well... The reason why I write about this is just to see if any of you talented folks here whould be interested in making something like this or improve the programs that exists.
There are a couple of other similar programs I've checked out. One is at this link:
http://www.fearby.com/products/3dfishtank/evaluation.shtmlI voluntered as a playtester for this program and the maker said he whould send me a copy to test but I haven't heard anything from him since last year. It seems like a dead program. It wont even run on my computer.
Another one I've been looking at is something called Aquazone. It's difficult to get information about how much a-life-like this is. I was thinking about maybe purchasing it, but I don't trust that it does what I want it to do.
So... I was just wondering if any of you whould be interested in something like this? Maybe after you've completed Darwinbots.