Long time, no post. I’ve mainly been focused on updating my other blog over at shogan.co.uk and have not dedicated much time to putting up anything over here.
I tend to get small bursts of time on occasion to play around with my own ideas in Unity. This time around I created a small 3D world that is randomly generated and contains a little bit of wildlife with some basic needs.
- Terrain generated with colour as the indicator of ‘height’. E.g. areas around water are sanding and fade up to grass and then darker grass as you go further inland.
- Trees and food nodes are scattered around.
- Water is spawned.
- Chickens are created (male and female) and have basic needs like thirst, hunger and reproduction.
At the moment the animals simply wander around as their needs become more and more urgent. They’ll eat, drink or reproduce based on these needs.
If a need goes long enough without being met, they will die.
The idea is to get some interesting statistics and figures out of the simulation, observing what patterns develop and where animal populations end up highly populated or sparse.
I still need to do more work on it, but some interesting new features to add that I have planned are:
- Introduce predators.
- Add a genetics system with traits that can be passed on to offspring.
- Positive or negative traits will either help or hinder animals throughout their lives.
Adding the above systems should definitely spice up the simulation and allow for some interesting observations.