Yes, I've seen this happen and it really bothers me as well. I constantly keep getting comments / reviews claiming that the algorithm is clearly not picking the best one or that the fitness function has a problem but that isn't the case here. Otherwise, the creatures in the simulation scene would also stop and do nothing - but they don't. They continue to evolve like expected. This is definitely a bug with the "Best of Gen." scene and I currently have no idea why it's happening. I'll probably have to figure out a way to "look into" their brain and see why they aren't doing what they were doing before even though they have exactly the same chromosome.

A major problem with this is that I don't even know how to consistently reproduce this issue. As you might have noticed yourself this doesn't happen all the time - in fact it only rarely happens which makes debugging it a lot more difficult.

So if you, or really anybody, could help me figure out how to reproduce this bug, I'd be very grateful!

Thanks for starting this thread!

Great video! This is definitely one of my favourites :) Thanks a lot!

Well, holding on is better than falling but the creatures have to be able to actively climb up to get a fitness score above 50%.

Here's one made by user Mr. No Name on a japanese forum: http://imgur.com/dp6ApTZ

Here's another great one by kwanasp on reddit: https://gfycat.com/ClearcutDelightfulErmine

Great game! 10/10 would pet again. I should be learning for my exams right now but instead I'm petting virtual fluffy pups at a virtual party I don't want to be at. Part of me wants a feature that lets me pet all of the good boys in the dog library as much as I want, pretty much just a room with me and all of the dogs and no time restriction - But then again at that point I probably wouldn't get anything done anymore. 

It is currently already the case that the creature with the maximum distance from the ground (measured from the lowest joint) is given the highest fitness score, I'm not choosing the highest center of gravity.

Thinking about it though, I should probably change it to optimize some sort of a weighted average between the lowest and highest joint height, because currently, if there's two creatures - one doesn't move at all and the other one extends itself upwards but without actually leaving the ground - the algorithm gives both of them a score of 0 because they both effectively didn't jump at all. However, it makes a lot of sense to give creature no.2 a higher fitness score because it was a lot closer to jumping than creature no. 1.

I'm going to play around with this for the next update to see what I can do. Thanks for pointing it out!

Yes, in the running mode the creatures will attempt to optimize their ability to move towards the right while in jumping mode they will try to reach the maximum height. The simulation modes are completely independent of each other.

As far as the saves are concerned, there are two different types of saves. Saving a creature (using the "Save" button) will only save the body design. There is no simulation progress / neural network / brain connected to these body saves. The only way to save simulations is to click on the save button in the simulation screen (or tick the autosave toggle). This is then going to save both the creature body, all of the brains of the currently simulating generation and the brains of the best creatures of the previously simulated generations into a separate save-file. You can then load these saves and continue the simulation from the creature building screen.

Note that this save has no effect on the creature body design save file (since the body is also completely saved again into the simulation save file separately). If you start a new simulation and save it again it won't overwrite the old saves (because it's a completely independent simulation and that can have a completely different result even if you didn't change anything about your creature design or the simulation settings). The only time anything is overwritten is if you use the autosave-feature, which just deletes the previous autosave of the same simulation before writing the new one - just so you don't end up unnecessarily accumulating files that you realistically don't want.

The problem is that all of the movements are simulated using Unity's physics engine. I remember that I once tried to increase the timescale in Unity but that messed up the physics simulation so the creatures weren't moving properly anymore. I'm going to try to see if there is any way I could possibly increase the overall simulation speed but I'm not too optimistic about it.

Thanks! 

You'll definitely want to make sure that you give the creatures enough time to show their behaviour before the selection process kicks in, otherwise the algorithm has no way of knowing which ones are the best / have the best strategies. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is setting the time per generation to 1 sec and then wondering why nothing happens. Lowering the time per generation is not equivalent to speeding up the simulation overall.

As far as how many generations you'll want to wait I'd say that depends on the complexity of the creature and also on luck. If your creature is complex (i.e. it has a lot of muscles) then it's going to be more difficult for it to learn how to coordinate all of those compared to a creature that only has one or two muscles. However, since the initial brains are completely random you might get lucky and end up having a couple of creatures in your first generation that already have a decent strategy - in this case you'll see them progress a lot quicker - or you might get unlucky and start with a bunch of creatures that just do nothing at first. If you see them still just do nothing after about 15 generations I'd just restart the simulation and hope for a better group of starting creatures. 

Oh the librarians' translation area seems to be above the books. That's actually more of a bug than an easter-egg. If you click on a librarian that text field will show something that the librarian has translated from the books using a variation of a grammar proposed by brddte in a thread in the libraryofbabel.info forum. Every 20 seconds they pick a random section from one of the books in the room they're in and 'translate' it. If they haven't translated anything yet, they'll just say "It's all just gibberish!". If you wait in the same room for about 20 seconds you'll start to see the translations.

As far as the easter-egg is concerned: It's definitely big enough for you to be certain that you've found it in case you ever happen to see it.  
I'm just going to give you one hint: If you ever see the lighting change, follow it!

Also, thanks for the donation, I really appreciate it!

I currently have no plans to add different languages to the simulation. I appreciate the offer though!
If I ever decide to add translations, I'll let you know.

Thanks for the offer, I really appreciate it!

However, because I'm going to try to implement many non-trivial features (mostly asked for by users) in the next update, I'm going to have to change quite a lot of the current code and structure and thus, I wouldn't want you to spend a bunch of your time on trying to figure out how things are currently working and maybe even implement new features which then end up conflicting with some of the things I was going to change (And I really don't have the time to try to coordinate this right now).

After I release the next update (which I'm going to start working on in about two months) I'll immediately let you know so you can look into the code and maybe add some features yourself if you like :)

I mean it shouldn't be too hard for you to find the source code right now if you really wanted to see it ;) I just wanted you to know that you probably won't want to invest too much time into this project before the next update, just to avoid any sort frustration in the future.

Also, Is your e-mail ebheor@gmail.com or ebhero@gmail.com? I just want to make sure it wasn't a typo :)

Thank you! I'm really glad to hear that!

There will be a bigger update sometime in the future in which I'll try to implement some of the most requested and non-trivial features but it's going to take at least two months before I'll have time to even start working on it again. 

Hey George! I've seen at least all of the default creatures that I've included do pretty well. Here's a gif I made with a couple of those if you're interested: https://twitter.com/keiwando/s... 
I also have two different frogger simulations that had interesting results: In one of them they jump forward and in the other one (~gen. 35) they slowly but consistently walk by extending their legs in a pretty natural way.

Let me just quickly add a couple of tips / things to consider:

1) Always let the simulation run for a bit before judging the progress. I say this because I've seen some people build creatures that will definitely be able to do the task but then they don't even let them get to the second generation before saying "This doesn't work. What am I doing wrong?" and going back.

2) As far as building creatures is concerned the biggest tip I could give you is to try to build as simple as possible. Each bone has a weight, so the more bones you use the heavier the overall creature gets. And the heavier it gets the more muscles you'll need to add strategically to be able to move the body. But, every additional muscle adds a degree of complexity to the brain - since there is more stuff to control and therefore also more muscles that could cancel each other's effect out when the brain isn't as evolved yet - so it will take a lot longer to evolve a complex creature with a lot of muscles compared to a simple one.

3) When you start a simulation every creature starts off with a random brain - and therefore random behaviour. So it could technically be the case that most or all of them start out by just doing nothing and not moving at all. If you  wait for a couple of generations and there still isn't a lot happening you can also just come back and start a new simulation with the exact same creature. Chances are that at least a couple of them are going to do something interesting, which will then slowly pull the rest of the population to evolve into that direction.

I hope this helped, if you have any other questions please let me know! (You can also read the help section by clicking on the (?) button in the creature building scene.)

The only reason I picked that model is because it was the only free and halfway decent-looking humanoid model in the Unity Asset store. I would have preferred something looking a bit more like a monk but well, there isn't a lot to choose from when you're on a budget :D

The screenshots here are a little bit outdated as well. In the actual game itself you'll notice that the librarians have a completely black shader applied to them, which makes them look more like mysterious 3D shadows rather than creepy monsters out of a bad horror game.