Hi there, sorry if this is considered a support post, however I believe it to be more of a general discussion regarding evolutionary simulators which could also help me in my development of one.
What are some of the fundamental in these kind of simulators?
Personally, I am developing a simulation I have in mind, without revealing much, I want to make these cells have basic functions and reproduce, creating new generations - hoping to see advancements in these functions as generations move on e.g., seeing cells decrease in size in order to have lower requirements of energy intake and possibly increasing lifespan or something like that.
I have set up some basic fundamentals for my simulation, however I wish to progress my knowledge of this kind of thing and have found some nice material to help me - if there’s anyone out there willing to discuss what they know, refer material they believe is helpful and relevant and just overall discuss evolution simulators, or any relevant simulators being developed inside of Unity.
You may want to look into modeling and simulation as a scientific research topic. Its not clear to me how much help that may be buttt there are other things to look into as well.
Genetic algorithms could be useful but those algorithms are more meant for optimization problems and have the same problem that natural selection has in reality that is: it takes very long periods of time to evolve anything similar to life today… they are still useful though.
Disclaimer: I am far from an expert on any of this. My google-fu is on point thought
It also depends on how deep you want to go, your starting with cell based model, would you want to “evolve” the cells into mutli-cellular organisms and then on to complex life? Do you want to dive into DNA sequences as well?
“computational biology” reading might provide some insights:
Resources like this and those pointed out by @ are great but may need a framework around them for any kind of game use. Off the top of my head you’d want to advance time and fork randomly at random time intervals to different mutations in dna / cell / organism that either better utilize resources or doesn’t. Many of the latter would in theory die off in future generations, while those that randomly ended up with better use of resources stay around to have more offspring.
Time is key; since it takes so long you’d want to either speed up time or do it virtually with a defined rate with some more randomness thrown in. Think about how long a player would have the patience to sit and wait for things to evolve and design a rate that you find not too long, etc.
Good luck!
legal jargon: I’ve worked in biotech for years but don’t really know this stuff nearly as well.
