Hey Wick, thank you so much for giving me all of this great feedback! I'm glad you enjoyed the simulator.
I'm currently working on the next big update (v2.0) and I've already implemented a bunch of heavily requested features:
- You'll be able to move joints after placing them
- There's a grid option to help with symmetry and joint placement
- You can delete saved creatures and simulation files
- Adjustable simulation settings during the simulation (time per generation, mutation rate ...)
- Customizable Neural Networks (You'll be able to decide the number of layers and the number of nodes per layer)
- I've also added the ability to simulate each generation in multiple batches which can be useful if you're running the simulator on a low-powered device or if you're trying to simulate rather complex creatures. That means you can for example set your population size to 20 and your batch size to 4 and then it would simulate 5 batches of 4 creatures for every generation (one after the other) before picking the best ones.
- The next version will also store and display more stats about a creature, such as the distance travelled, average speed, weight...
- You'll be able to watch each creature on its own while the others continue to simulate
There's still one last annoying bug that I'm going to have to try to fix somehow before I'm able to release the next version. Hopefully that won't take too long.
By the way, Crescent Loom looks really cool! Good luck with that project!