Web of Life?

[Magicat]

What is the Web of Life? It says "OUT OF ORDER" and I'm confused with what it does. I see a bunch of dots that are the colors of different species wandering in groups on the screen and I don't know what it is used for. Does anyone know what it is?

[OuijaMawl]

Tree_of_life_(biology)[en.wikipedia.org]

I suspect it is supposed to be one of these diagrams shown in that screen. It may be unfinished or is bugged in some way that it has been disabled

[countingtls]

Originally posted by Callipso:

Tree_of_life_(biology)[en.wikipedia.org]

I suspect it is supposed to be one of these diagrams shown in that screen. It may be unfinished or is bugged in some way that it has been disabled

The "tree of life" in the wiki has more to do with species relationship, but the web of life in game is based on individual genome relationship. More like visualization of the genetic diversity. It existed for a long time, and very laggy in earlier version. It is fun to watch and visualize but you have to zoom in and out, and generally quite difficult to click and a lot of time causing crash late in the game.

[Quasar]

It was originally supposed to be a way to visualize speciation. Genetically-similar creatures were supposed to ‘clump together’ on the web, and a species on the verge of speciation would appear as two distinct clumps with a thin connection of genetically-compatible creatures. As the compatible creatures died off, the clumps would separate and you’d have a new species.

Unfortunately, it never worked properly. Genetic comparisons are CPU-expensive operations, so keeping it up to date caused a lot of lag. Optimizing to fix that lag prevented it from working as designed (‘clumps’ would jerk about and move seemingly at random as the genetic comparison operations fought to keep up with the simulation), and towards the end of its lifespan it started causing crashes and being more of a liability than it was worth.

When I hung the ‘Out of Order’ sign on it I was still intending to go and fix it, but now I’m more inclined to drop it. I still like the idea, the speciation routine is an impressively complex bit of code and I’d love to show it off in-game, but I need to come up with a solution that actually works.

[Hamiltonian]

Quasar , have you thought of adding a food chain graph? It would be cool to visualize what eats what.