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New user issues

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Testlund:
Yeah, this is pretty cool. One could pretend it's little organs inside the bots.  I don't know how it will look like yet when you have put it all in, but little color dots or lines inside the bots that shows their state and what's happening inside them whould make it more interesting to look at. Maybe you could even make them look a little like mitocondria and similar.... Hmm.  

EricL:
Regarding the new user issues.

Beginning with 2.42.8f, the need to have performed a prior install should go away.  I have removed the reliance on sysvars.txt.  Additionally, the program itself will now create a settings directory if one is not found and will run without a lastexit.set or default.set file, using reasonable internal defaults.

I still have some work to go here.  No bots come with the naked exe for example and I have yet to handle cases where a sim save is attempted and no Saves directory exists (and several other such cases) but I will get to these.  The goal of needing nothing but the exe is pretty close.  In particular, I plan to add a built-in default plant and a built-in default animal species (essentially Alga_minimalis and Animal_minimalis whose DNA will be inside the exe) and have them cued up and ready to go with appropraite settings as part of a default sim so that the first time user need do nothing but run the exe and start the default sim in order to get a viaable sim running seconds after downloading.

The built in plant will likely become the simple food source discussed here.

Numsgil:
Not entirely related, but your discussion of a self-boot strapping exe reminded me of my own experiments with them.  I made a game in 15KB that used OpenGL to make a terrain demo with a procedurally generated dirt texture and some experimental procedural clouds.

In particular, you can add alot of stuff to the exe, especially text, if you're willing to pack the exe.  UPX is my personal favorite.

It doesn't impact the executable's speed in any way, and you can get a good 60% compression going.  A zip of the exe is going to be marginally smaller, and the program will load faster (unpacking is faster than reading from the very slow hard drive).

It's pretty easy to set up a .bat file to automate the compression.  It would look like this:

upx yourprogram.exe
pause

Doesn't really add anything all that neat, especially in today's day and age, but I think it's pretty neat to run a program that's tiny

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