Ok so technically this is breveCreatures (breve is the environment it runs in) but it's still neat. I found this a while ago when it wasn't nearly as polished, and now it looks pretty decent.
breveCreatures Screensaver | breve
Basically what happens is a bunch of polygons are randomly generated and some moving parts are added that move sporadically. You have a distance gauge and the moving parts help the main body (whatever the body may be, there may not be a definite body even) bounce, crawl, fall, or whatever towards the higher distance. It goes through generations of 25 creatures and then finds what the best creatures out of that generation were (in terms of distance traveled and speed, I believe) and takes their 'genes' and applies them to the next generation. It's basically evolution through polygons.
Quite neat. My previous one (way back in the day) had a whopping 140ish distance traveled and it was a bi-pedal creature that would fall over every now and then onto a 'nose' which would then act as a third leg, and the way it moved would push it back up onto bipedaldness. Quite bizarre but eh, it worked.
My current one is a sidewinder snake deal which has gotten 55 units so far, but I didn't like the looks of it so I reset the screensaver and am making my way back through the generations now.
At first it's nothing to look at, just humorous when it spawns a single block and expects it to go anywhere lol. But leave it on for a few nights (it saves the progress after each interruption) and you'll eventually have a functioning critter.
breveCreatures Screensaver | breve
Basically what happens is a bunch of polygons are randomly generated and some moving parts are added that move sporadically. You have a distance gauge and the moving parts help the main body (whatever the body may be, there may not be a definite body even) bounce, crawl, fall, or whatever towards the higher distance. It goes through generations of 25 creatures and then finds what the best creatures out of that generation were (in terms of distance traveled and speed, I believe) and takes their 'genes' and applies them to the next generation. It's basically evolution through polygons.
Quite neat. My previous one (way back in the day) had a whopping 140ish distance traveled and it was a bi-pedal creature that would fall over every now and then onto a 'nose' which would then act as a third leg, and the way it moved would push it back up onto bipedaldness. Quite bizarre but eh, it worked.
My current one is a sidewinder snake deal which has gotten 55 units so far, but I didn't like the looks of it so I reset the screensaver and am making my way back through the generations now.
At first it's nothing to look at, just humorous when it spawns a single block and expects it to go anywhere lol. But leave it on for a few nights (it saves the progress after each interruption) and you'll eventually have a functioning critter.