'Poo!'

Oooooh!

I can take critters from old versions not being 100% guaranteed compatible with new ones, because the updates have been so interesting.

Fab

A few purchases here do get the buyer a Steam key - it's up to the developer whether or not they think the extra cost is worth it in terms of additional sales.

Degica's VNM? I haven't seen anything about dropping Linux support, but then I haven't seen any updates from them in a while.

That would be great - let's see if it does work.

Oooh! Do you get a Steam key if you buy it here? They make it so easy to run games on Linux via Proton.

I haven't got a quarter the way through reading this yet, but I have to say that it is one of the most stunningly designed rule books I have ever seen.

It does now - thanks - but it really isn't that long ago that it didn't.

Within the past year, I think I've ended up rebuying at least three things I had already bought in one of the big bundles because at that point. it didn't.

https://itch.io/post/4239457/view-in-topic

It's not something I can buy at the moment, but YES YES YES!

I think what they're worried about is people buying, say, https://urocyongames.itch.io/neuraquarium (and I think people should!), then buying the Mega Bundle For Whatever and not being able to find Neuraquarium in their library because it's behind a thousand other things, 99% of which they will never download and aren't really interested in. 

The 1% they do will vary according to users' tastes, of course, but I would be very surprised the share of purchasers who download more than a hundred things in a thousand item bundle is more than 10%. (And most of those won't actually play / use what they did do an archive download of.)

On the one hand, your site, your rules and the bundles have been amazingly good.

On the other, it was really annoying that I can go to the page of something I have got in one of the big bundles but not yet downloaded and not be informed in any way that I already have it before I pay more money to have it.. again.

I have done this several times. In at least one case - https://sparsegamedev.itch.io/spring-falls - I don't mind so much: they got nothing and it's a really, really good puzzle game. But that's not always the case.

So yes, I get that you don't want to automatically add a thousand things to my 'purchased' list, but not warning users in any way that they're re-purchasing stuff just looked greedy and I'm glad that's no longer the case.

Oooh!

The original [ window.history.back() ] version worked for me, whereas the [  $('.nav_btn')[1].click(); ] suggestion went back to page one of the bundle each time. It would then grind back to the right page and continue, but it was adding serious runtime and consequent CPU usage.

It is currently doing the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality for me. It got stuck at one point - some publisher removed three games from here and the script can't cope with the resulting error pages. Fortunately, they were all on the same one of the fifty nine pages of items, so it was easy to do the remainder on that page manually then resume the script on the next page.. and I see it's just finished.

Thanks to you and, of course, the author of the original script.

Itch really should do this automatically with a single button click, of course, but hey ho...

In space, your neighbours will speak British English...

Oooh!

What are the differences in the version posted a couple of days ago?

If there were command line options to say 'load this file, run this long, save and then quit', it'd be good :)

As it is, it's not easy to automate without something that can record and replay mouse clicks.

There was I thinking proper memory management was one of the points of C# :)

I've left it running for over a week, and the memory use gets to be Quite Big:

VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                       

23.0g  18.3g  17.9g R 162.3  58.4  35322:54 NQL.x86_64 

Memory used + reserved  - 23.0 GiB

Non-swapped actual physical memory used - 18.3 GiB

Most (17.9 GiB) of that is shared.. but it's still taking up over half of the RAM here, and these are way higher figures than at the start of running it.

I wondered if it was the log file being held in RAM, but that's 'only' 603 MB.

Thank you!

I have seen the evolutionary advantage of being tge same colour as the walls, but one of the things I have yet to spot in the weeks playing this is a meat-eating line evolving to be the colour of the grass to attract any passing herbivores a bit nearer :)

Hmm, some more checking shows that owning things in bundles is generally shown on the items' individual pages, including the Good Bundle, but not for the Racial Justice or the Palestinian Aid bundles.

Is there a reason for that? 

A search of the purchase database would show how many other people have done exactly what I've done, three times, without being warned. How many is it?

Amongst the problems with that is that you (I) can't buy something here for less than a dollar. Which then gets made into $1.20 with VAT here.

If it were possible to put more than one thing into a cart and then buy them together, I would be more convinced that your answer was OK.

I would regard this as a bug, personally.

If you've bought something here - even for nothing - you don't expect it to disappear like this.

See above :) It's DirectX 12, with features level 10_1,10_0,9_3,9_2,9_1.

It's a VMware virtual machine. I don't run random programs on a real one unless I have to, and this seems to cope with everything else, but I am not sure I have anything else on it using the Unreal Engine. (Unity, yes, Unreal, not sure.)

Looks very interesting, so bought and downloaded. The installer adds assorted things to my system. When I try to run it, I get a "DX11 feature level 10.0 is required to run the engine" error message.

From DXDiag:

..
DirectX Version: DirectX 12
..

DDI Version: 10.1
Feature Levels: 10_1,10_0,9_3,9_2,9_1
..

Doesn't that mean I have it? What's it actually wanting?

Sounds like you need Asterix...

Oh, and another one, this time got in the Racial Justice bundle, bought again in February.

The site I'm using to check this - far quicker than I can here - just has those two and not, for example, the Good Bundle from 2016 and I bet I've re-bought something from that...

This got me checking - yep, same day, same 'previously got' in another bundle, for another game.

I get why games bought in a bundle are not automatically put in 'my library' until I have actually downloaded / played them. Especially when there are bundles of more than a thousand products.

However, why is there no indication on the individual pages for the games that you already have them in a bundle? You know I have it, why not say so??

5th June - buy the Palestinian Aid bundle
30th June - go 'that looks good' at something in the summer sale, and buy it.
5th July - realise that it was in the bundle.

I am not jumping up and down demanding a refund - the item in question is really good and the creator got nothing for it in the bundle - but it's not the first time I have done this.

It is odd that the only way you can buy a bunch of games from different developers in one go is if they put them in a bundle, and not if you put them in a basket.

Thank you! Looking forward to playing this when I get back home and I'm not using a 32-bit only netbook...

The main run is still continuing on this PC. Critters have got smaller again.

Last night, I started another run on a slower PC. I deliberately made things a bit tougher (less fruit spawning, higher reproduction cost) because the main one is always bouncing at 149 or 150 Critters.

By the morning, it'd done just over 100 generations. There were only about 50 of them - that worked! - and they were all yellow. At lunchtime, another 100 or so generations had happened, about 80 were alive - and they were all white.

I am wondering if there was a severe population crunch or two and everyone's the descendant of one yellow mutation, because there's no obvious meat hunting going on to provide a big evolutionary push to change colour.  But it's impossible to tell!

Can we have an (optional) log file that records births / deaths (inc health expiring and being eaten) / sex / non-neural net mutations? Just text is fine - the people who will be into this can do their own graphs / stats analysis.

A 'save game every x generations' feature would also be helpful, especially if the random number generator is one where running with same start position with the same seed = same result, so you can replay what happened between two saves. If it's not, having one that is would be good.

(I really hoping I am not the only one playing with this :) If you're reading this, it's fascinating - BUY IT!)

With a higher fruit spawn delay and energy from eating fruit also increased (to see if that increases the evolution of better searching), it's interesting that the average size of Critter has gone up and the average speed gone down.

Given the life expectancy of any of the 'oldest critter' I examine more closely seems so short, I am not totally convinced that they are, in fact, 3333 or whatever generations old.

I do like the way that, when zoomed in, you can often see what they're 'seeing' via changes in colour of their eye.

Linux users vary in how vocal they are :) On Steam, if something works with their 'Proton' system - and most things I am interested in now do - I am not particularly fussed about a native version. Here, if I can see that something is made with tools that can do the port easily, I am more likely to ask...

.. and the Linux build 'just worked' (latest version of Ubuntu MATE, 64-bit), thank you!

Thank you for that - the group icons would be fine, particularly as it's can be very difficult to interpret just what's going on in a neural net, so seeing that 'vision' excitement leads to that action should be enough.

There could definitely be more info around the basic rules of life. I think that energy is mostly a 'reproduction energy' thing, but having lots / none increases/decreases health, and health is life (high) or death (zero). Eating increases energy, but it doesn't look like, for example, moving quickly uses more than just sitting there. Strength determines who eats who? Or is there some directional element in the way that there is for the green stuff? (It's amusing to see a Critter desperate for more energy going backwards, pushing along the food that would save it if it were at the other end...)

I cannot resist wondering what could be added to this without adding to the runtime overhead. Something like attack (teeth) vs defence (shell / spikes) vs hiding (triggering other Critter's visual neurons less - or is this what colour mutations effectively do?) vs...  all competing for the same limited resource at birth, with the proportions depending on mutations/sex.  

The obvious niche I am waiting to see evolution fill is 'going along walls, eating all the dead fatally bruised Critters'!

The other thing that I can see some people appreciating is the option to turn the sound off :)

- Just what do the various points on the neural net represent? At the moment, without the source/more documentation, users can see that something is going on, but not what.

- It's sometimes hard to click on a critter without pausing the simulation.

One bug: the suggested save file names - eg 'NeuraQuarium Save 03/06/2021 13:01:49' - are not legal in Windows because of the / and : characters.

I'd rather not be running this in a Windows VM in the first place. It's using  Mono and Unity, isn't it? Is there any chance of a native Linux version?

Given that it uses Unity, is there any chance of  a native Linux build?

Fab!

A good read and bound to produce 'what, they missed out one of my favourite games' responses - the omission of Empire: Wargame of the Century / Empire Deluxe is particularly shocking :)

Having their excellent guide to video adventure games, I was expecting a bit more than the 'most of a page' coverage of each one though...

Thank you!