Creatures evolving to break the game?

Hudston

Larva
Since i got the game I've been leaving it running overnight to see what the simulation gives me. Yesterday I woke up to find the game running at <1 fps, thinking that maybe there's a memory leak or something I (eventually) saved the best specimen and restarted the game but when I loaded it back up and tried to spawn that specimen the game dropped to <1 fps again. This doesn't happen with any of my other saved creatures, only that one. Any idea why that might be happening?
 

Tom Johnson

Queen
Developer of Ecosystem
Ecosystem Beta Tester
Since i got the game I've been leaving it running overnight to see what the simulation gives me. Yesterday I woke up to find the game running at <1 fps, thinking that maybe there's a memory leak or something I (eventually) saved the best specimen and restarted the game but when I loaded it back up and tried to spawn that specimen the game dropped to <1 fps again. This doesn't happen with any of my other saved creatures, only that one. Any idea why that might be happening?
That's really interesting! Maybe it has an enormous amount of neurons? If you wanted to send it to me, I would be happy to check it out (Saved DNA is stored in files with a ".dna" extension in C:\Users\YOURUSERNAMEHERE\AppData\LocalLow\Tom Johnson\Ecosystem)

Sometimes they do evolve in very strange ways. In early builds, creature brains would process at a different rate than the physics simulation, and as a result of this there were species that could only survive at certain framerates!
 

Hudston

Larva
I can't upload it to the forum sadly, how can I send it to you? Interestingly, I have 3 iterations of it saved. The first is 8kb, the second is 100kb and the third, which is the one that breaks my game (it even starts to lag just selecting it in the menu!) is 428kb! Considering it barely changed shape at all since the first iteration I think you're probably right about it having a giant brain. :p
 

Tom Johnson

Queen
Developer of Ecosystem
Ecosystem Beta Tester
I can't upload it to the forum sadly, how can I send it to you? Interestingly, I have 3 iterations of it saved. The first is 8kb, the second is 100kb and the third, which is the one that breaks my game (it even starts to lag just selecting it in the menu!) is 428kb! Considering it barely changed shape at all since the first iteration I think you're probably right about it having a giant brain. :p
Eight to ten kB seems average so that must really be quite a creature. You could send it to my email, which is just my first name @ ecosystem-game.com. I'm quite curious to see both what happened and how it got that way.
 

Tom Johnson

Queen
Developer of Ecosystem
Ecosystem Beta Tester
It turns out the slowdown was caused by the creatures having immense brains. Here's the medium one!

bigbrain.png
It still only really has two muscles, so it was doing some enormously complicated calculations to decide when to contract them, ha. I can maybe add a very small energy-efficiency cost to having more neurons, so there would at least be a selection pressure against just loading up on them forever (I can also add a maximum cap, changeable in the settings menu, to prevent worst case scenarios). Thank you for taking the time to find the creatures and send them. It made finding and fixing the problem much easier, and hopefully you saved future players some trouble down the line too. :)
 
I have noticed that my GPU shows less than 30 percent utilization even when there's lag from this. I have a GTX 1060 6Gb; maybe this will help.
 
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