A Cell that Kills Everything (Life Engine) 

To those saying Json is a not a language, I didn't call it a PROGRAMMING language, I just called it a language, like xml or html. Come at me pedants! 🥊😡🥊

“While other organisms evolved normal things such as armor and mouths, NED went over to the local Home Depot and bought a chainsaw”

You've introduced a 3D organism to a 2D world - no reason to stop at NED, play around with this further and see what happens

NED: Non Euclidian Destroyer. Also known as "Now Everything Dies."

Next Step: Simulate a cell and all of its functions and insides along with a plasmid editor that you can use to design the cells genetic code that expresses proteins and in turn, pathways.

Something I've really been wanting is the ability to make localized changes to some of the world settings. Like a way to paint a shape similar to walls and then define some properties for that area, like being reduced vision or increased reproduction cost. It'd be fun to have two radically different environments and then watch what happens at the interface. I imagine you'd get some interesting adaptations from creatures that try to straddle the line between to extremes.

I once made a world like the one at 8:14, where tiny organisms could migrate between large producer organisms, eating food and cleaning up dead organisms to make room for new ones to grow. It wasn't stable enough for the small organisms to survive for very long though, so I created a "virus" organism which was specially shaped to find the entrance of the producer organisms, rotate backwards so that its killer cells touched the host, and was then unable to rotate back out because new food would physically prevent the rotation. This was much more effective at controlling the population of the big organisms, and I created varieties designed to harmlessly consume food by locking into the producer organisms, and varieties designed to kill the big organisms as fast as possible. This was prone to large extinction events, so maybe if I created physical barriers between regions like the "Epic" world preset then some big organisms would survive to repopulate.

I'd tried making a few massive organisms evolve but they never end up becoming anything interesting. Best I got had something like 500 cells though. That was cool. My favorite way to mess around with the life engine was to make mazes of walls. I'd love to see an auto maze wall generation. Ending up with large routes, open areas, capillaries, and seeing what creatures evolve for those different environments and how they propagate through the maze... it's beautiful. Oh, how about a creature that places walls and a creature that eats them?

I find it really interesting that if you set a high enough automatic food production, you can recreate the dodo bird, and either adding a basic predator or removing the food will entirely destroy the system

NED is an eldrich monster in context! That’s fun

I have a few ideas for a future update. I think they could be really, *really* cool, so i'd ask that you consider them -*A naming system* for species to make phylogenetic understanding easier: With complex worlds, it's very, *very* entertaining to watch the rise and fall of certain groups of organisms and their development. However sometimes there is mystery when you can't determine where certain clades came from and it can be hard to get a coherent understanding of the whole biosphere in its complexity. So I'm proposing a kind of naming system for species. No, i'm not suggesting an automatic latin name generator. Instead, basically you just give organisms a tag (eg: 'UEKAFPD"), and in the mutation process if its offspring are mutated, change the tag slightly by overwriting one of the letters. To make it potentially even more intuitive, perhaps make the first characters much less likely to be changed than the last characters, so differences in the first letters means a huge phylogenetic difference and a difference in the last letters, not much difference. I think it could make tracking the evolutionary history of life forms much much more intuitive, powerful, and fun. -*Custom climate changes/ timecycles*: The natural world is full of all kinds of cycles and long term changes in climate which play big roles in the evolutionary history of life. There are ice ages and interglacials. Sometimes volcanoes spew out stuff that blocks sunlight and spells extinction. At some periods there is much more oxygen, and in some periods there is much less oxygen. Now in the modern era, there are drastic changes happening (now due to human industry). So i'm thinking of a system where the user can set up kind up schedules for long term changes/cycles. Like the user could set up something so that automatically the food production probability can drop and rise again... or the auto food drop rate, or the lifespan multiplier... the extra mover cost (like oxygen content?) and even look range (like fog irl?). This would add great texture to just admiring the evolutionary history of the worlds in the life engine. And think about it. A lot of great changes in evolutionary history came about through extinction events or changes in climate. Giant insects came in the carboniferous through increased oxygen content. The End Permian event allowed for the rise of the dinosaurs. The end cretacious event allowed for the synapdids (mammals) to dominate the earth again after eternity of being dominated by dinosaurs. Most evolutionary time epochs are marked by these events. So it could be a great feature to add in the life engine. -*Regional differences* Also in nature there are regional differences. Towards the poles it becomes colder, and towards the equators it becomes warmer. Certain areas are more arid, while others are more humid. Basically, this is kind of similar to the last idea but it is varied by geographical space rather than time. It would add texture to worlds of the life engine. Imagine the different biomes, characterized by differing parameters and different opportunities for life to evolve in. This would require that there be a whole set of parameters for each region the user can create in game. I imagine that the user could set up regions using a kind of rectangle selection tool or even a brush tool. There would be different tabs representing each region for the different parameters to apply. By default, there would be one region encompassing the whole map. I would also recommend that there be another tab to affect the general parameters of all regions all together. Maybe doing this AND the custom timecycles might be too complicated, so if you were to choose one I would do the regional differences only as I guess the custom climate changes could be done by the user. So i'm sorry for the essay of a comment but I think these recommendations could be very cool and practical in game. gl on your future projects

Ned is really cool, with the way they are created and named is just really satisfying.

playing around with the simulation, i've found that creatures with an armor layer completely surrounding them while minimizing internal space are really successful in co-existing with ned

Keep up the good work. God bless you

The fact that you'd add NED tempts me to try to learn enough to create something naughty, if I were able to bring it to within my capabilities; an organism that 'simply' reads and rewrites the characteristics of cells that do not belong to it into being harmless food within a range of +1 to the 'longest read range' characteristic of all other cells in the same world. Sort of like those DBZ episodes where Boo turns peeps into chocolate bars and eats them, but with less 'HAAAAAAA!'. I'm not at all sure I can do it though, as I'm more than just a bit of a doofus at this stuff, so.. maybe just mentioning it in a comment on youtube gets someone more capable fired up? :)

I love the community showcase! wonder how hard it'd be to allow multiple mods to work together

Even plaintext is a language

Truly amazing.👌👌

An extended life engine which includes a pseudo-third dimension would be fun. Like having layers, layer 1 would be the normal life engine, and layer upwards would cost more resources (gravity stress??) But be advantegeous as a creature would be able to have more compact designs

I... had an idea to make something like this. I have been dabbling about it in thoughts. I thought nobody else had thought of it yet... but now... I see this randomly on my feed. I feel saddened to see that it someone else had a similar idea before and executed it to make something. But, no, I'm not discouraged. Imma follow you and see how you've worked upon this and what techs you have used. Edit : Subscribed

YOOO a new video!!!

Sooooo its agressive, kills everything quick, then dies. Bruh they made a bioweapon

Your channel has pretty interesting content. I would like to write a sci-fi novel with some of those crazy ideas, mindcraft is pretty cool.

cool, cant wait for Life Engine 2 now XD

Hahah! Proud of my little rose on that first try.

My personal idea for how you could implement higher level movement computation, is to have a neural network, but not so much for the purpose of making decisions. Basically, the brain would store a grid of cells and simulate a version of the life engine on a smaller scale, with certain creatures in this small-scale life engine being bad, and certain creatures being good, the brain's grid would naturally populate with evil creatures when an eye spots something the creature doesn't like, then the neural network would interpret the things happening in the brain's grid as different actions. Then you as a player can initialize the brain's grid.

You should add a cell that does nothing, i mean i dont think it will add that much, but it would be nice.

Having heat regions seems like itll be cool. Imagine having a hot zone where itll reduce food intake, improve movement speed and having a colder zone where the organism moves slower, likely die and consumes more food just to survive. I imagine there also being a 'cryogenic' temperature where organisms have suspended animation. It would pair well with a crop and drag feature so we can make tiny vials out of walls and cryogenic temps containing organism samples without the fear of them dying or eaten off.

9:01 bob is a glutton he doesnt want to get off his feet and only eats

10:28 this black shape at right looks like a Rhinoceros Beetle! Cool!

Wait, what is this game? Is this GooGrid again, where you create an organism and then let it out into an ecosystem? Is it multiplayer like GooGrid was? Googrid was great. Everyone had their own little ecosystem neighboring 4 other ecosystems and could toss their organisms into neighboring cells, and migration urge/frustration handling was a variable that could be tweaked to have them move normally especially if food became scarce. Along with similar variables to this: armor, teeth, eyes, etc. Had mutation probability, reproduction frequency, poisonous, size, speed, matabolism, need for sleep, etc. Lots of really interesting critters developed as both the automatic evolution/player tweaking kept competing, you'd see tiny rapid scavengers, giant armored herbivores that poisoned predators, modestly sized predators or swarms of tiny cooperating ones that died easily to anything that fought back and had very short lifespans, but could overwhelm prey and then explode in reproduction off the remains. Game kept track of the most prosperous organisms on the server. Was a fascinating game. Shame it eventually shut down.

Honestly, what with those C++ improvements in the Extended Engine, and the proof of concept that is NED, a fully 3d life engine seems completely viable

this life engine thing looks cool

The fact that in the beginning something did survive is astounding. Wonder why it didn't get fully devoured until the second wave.

very cool

I came for the hot dog in the thumbnail

we all love NED, he's a simple single-celled organism at least nobody named it sh*thead

Ned is lterally L+ratio+I'm in your walls 💀

I like this

I made an ecosystem depending on 2 things, and a direct way to destroy it, it consists of what I call RATS (Mouths in an E shape, back of middle line has mover, then two eyes between lines) and the feeders (13x13 producers outline nothingness mouth in middle, armor outside producers in an on off pattern, rat feed) RATS are named the way they are because they swarm and tear through food swiftly. Counter is just feeder but larger and with killer surrounding it as well as multiple layers to create more food upon death, encouraging RATS to eat the dead, allowing exterminators to reproduce when trapped by producers, RATS end up dying, keeping either side from expansion, killing everything

I have no sweet clue what any of this but I like Ned. Neds cool.

I made an organism that can survives Ned. It’s a semi-large armored producer and it’s completely symmetrical

Ngl epic was epic

the equivalent of "you brought a nuke to a knife fight?"

This is really cool, but I was hoping this video was going to be about some life pattern that destroys most living cells as part of its replication process but will die out eventually using life’s base rules. The end result would be the same, but that’d be more interesting to me.

WHEN is the natural competition coming, I am dying to see it

ned is just like me omg, single celled organism

I fell like adding biomes would be very cool.

I wanted to make a mod where mover cells become producers in the next generation(and vice versa) but compiling the vanilla version only shows a blank screen :(

So it’s the life eater virus from Warhammer 40k

What I just learned from NED is, isolation is the key to avoiding extinction.

7:40 HUMAN, CENTIPEDE!

The Final Shape...

I feel like this engine is at the state where any additions are "nice to haves" and not really "have to haves". So please don't feel bad about taking your time and being responsible about what you want to add.

Some cell ideas for anyone to get inspired by or smth Regrow cell: when the main organism dies, 30% chance this cell remains and slowly grows back into the original creature Could allow for interesting evolution and even eggs Viro cell: chance on contact with another cell/organism that it transfers it's genome into that cell or organism and makes it express it Might allow pandemics or a zombie like situation Poison cell: releases a slightly transparent food-like tile that cannot be collided with Deals small damage to organisms in it

NED is my friend now

The thing about NED is that their efficiency at destroying can be matched by another creature's efficiency at producing. I tried to unleash NED on some 'plants' I had created, but for every plant NED destroyed five more took its place, because I had accidentally made the plants *too* good at reproducing

There is a bug in the software since months. It doesn't go above 60 fps if only a fraction of the map contains organisms.

suprised its free to play thought you would have to pay for it. would pay money for this. :)

this is like introducing a 3d organism into a 2d ecosystem

Basically the Thing/Carrion in a human population/IRL biosphere

8:00 Ive played so many sandbox games where the most simplistic layout for your organism/spaceship/tank or whatever you are building is that shape without realizing it…. Only after considering sharing it with people does it dawn on me…. Sucks that so many things are ruined by association….

It would be nice if we could have an option for symmetrical evolution, e.g. if one half of the creature develops a killer cell then the other half should have it too, that way rather than just garbled pixels maybe they might look more like a creature? just a suggestion lol

One possible thing could be the overwriting of food cells during reproduction.

Ya boy just created an eldritch abomination. Thankfully nothing unnatural like this could ever exist in real life... right?

Hey, so I do not know how to contact you (Emergent Garden) so I guess ill post it here. First of all, I'm a big fan of your work and have been subscribed for a little while. I'm a master's student doing my thesis on the use of emergence and ALife in robotics and was wondering if the continuous evolution found in the life engine was inspired by any specific paper since the literature for EA is rather lacklustre when it comes to asynchronous continuous evolution.

I would like if u could see the population of a specific species and see when a species died out

how did i stumble upon this on RU-vid 💀 at least this pique my interest

"Each top organism provides food for the bottom organism" And it's very high in protein

I wonder if making an organism that assimilates other organisms like The Thing is possible

absolutely no idea what this game is but it sure is cool

I'm curious if there's a standalone version, or plans for one.

How Lovecraftian.

So NED is basically a more advanced version of anthrax bioweapon created by the British?

I've been using life engine extended and you said organisms don't evolve eyes because of the way that they move? I'm not sure what you meant. I see them grow eyes once in a while so is there some way to actually make them do eyes?

hahaha kewl

Gene Manipulation in real life is like save editing nature. Hope we don't corrupt the save cause we haven't got any backups

Is this project dead? I would love to see more of this.

If it is rotating around the armor, is it possible that it was also rotating around the camo or could functionally see "around" it?

The chain is a human centipede

Can we get a natural Ned next?

make a non euclidean defender that constantly hunts ned see if it can help fight ned

congrates, you created dark matter in Life Engine, WTF

Would be nice if you could run the life engine without having to stay on the same tab all the time

kinda reminds me of space simulation toolkit

Are you planning on making a mobile version at some point?

{'mother_tongue': 'JSON', 'messages': ['hello there.', 'I'm speaking to you in the JSON language!']}

ned

Is there any life form that can eat dead bodies yet? I don't remember if you mentioned that before.

I haven't checked if it has already been pointed out but if you turn down the cell size to 0.5 it gets glitchy. REALLY glitchy.

So ned is basically Grey Goo....

4:36....Isn't this the last level of Robotron? Looks familiar...

'written in a language called json'

Bro invented the Malaise

reminds me of rgb-game!

NED is an SCP

So ned is a bacteria

Is NoLeafClover a reference to what I think it is?

Please add a cell to remove just one cell and not reset the entire creature.

You sir, made a virus bomb