amiantos / aeongarden

Aeon Garden is an artificial life toy for Apple devices built with SpriteKit

Hello there 👋

Welcome to my GitHub profile. You will find numerous things here for your enjoyment. But first, internalize:

People have been thinking too long that art is a privilege of the museums & the rich. Art is not business! It does not belong to banks & fancy investors. Art is food. You can't eat it but it feeds you. Art has to be cheap & available to everybody. Art soothes pain! Art wakes up sleepers! Art fights against war & stupdity! Art sings halleluja! Art is for kitchens! Art is like good bread! Art is like green trees! Art is like white clouds in blue sky! ART IS CHEAP!

Apps

• Aislingeach - iOS image generation client for the AI Horde
• Inneal - iOS chatbot client for the AI Horde
• PiBar - Manage your Pi-hole(s) from your macOS menu bar
• Gamebook Engine - Create and play interactive fiction on your iOS devices
• dotBeat - Swatch Internet Time in your macOS menu bar

macOS Screensavers

• Life Saver - Conway's Game of Life implemented as an artistic, abstract macOS screensaver and tvOS app
• MultiClock - Displays the time (and nifty animations) using 24 clocks
• Ealain - Infinite, forever changing abstract works of art, created using Stable Diffusion
• Last Statement - It's like the "Word of the Day" screensaver, except it's the last statements of people executed by the State of Texas

Toys

• Aeon Garden - An artificial life toy, kinda like an abstract fish tank that evolves over time

aeongarden's Issues

Make creatures glow when they eat

Death animation

It would be cool if when a creature died instead of fading into the background, it's limbs split apart and drift off / turn into food pellets

Minimal UI

Optional toggleable mini-UI for tank and creature stats

"Aeon Garden" name is lame?

Maybe needs a better name.

Favorite Creatures

Add ability to mark creatures as "favorite".

The main point of this is that favorite creatures have been graced by god to be extra lucky at avoiding death. How this is implemented as yet to be determined. Perhaps the creatures just become essentially invulnerable.

Auto-camera mode

Add automatic camera which will follow interesting (long-lived, marked favorite, activity type -- all are factors) creatures and zoom out occassionally

Collision Avoidance

Currently creatures make no attempt to avoid each other when swimming, they simply crash into each other and then swim some other direction (sometimes right back into each other). It would be better if they had some rudimentary path-finding and tried to avoid collisions.

Sounds

I want Aeon Garden to sound like a fish tank, soothing and gentle. Maybe one way to think of it is that this is a noise machine, randomly generated by the creatures living in the tank. It should sound like something you'd actually like to leave on as ambient noise in your environment, or to fall asleep to.

Tank settings refactor + platform specific settings

Tank settings should be structs and govern a wide variety of per-tank settings. Additionally each platform should have unique settings tailored for its screensize.

Provide tags/releases with binaries

Hi,

A friend referred me to this project, but I haven't been able to see it running on my system yet. Your instructions say to build it with Xcode, but that can be an exercise in frustration for those not very familiar with doing so. For example, there's the matter of code signing, which your project is configured to do, using your developer ID, which of course only you are allowed to use; others need to know which settings to change to get it to build.

Even then, the build can fail, as it does for me, because I'm using a version of Xcode older than you were, which lacks support for the version of the Swift language that you used.

Would you consider tagging your code with a stable version number, making a GitHub release, and attaching binaries that are compiled for compatibility with the maximum possible range of macOS versions?

iOS UI

• Pellet spawn rate
• Max pellet count
• Minimum Creature Count
• Migration Rate
• Birth chance?

More Creatures + Food in Screensaver Mode

Related to #13

Screensaver needs special settings that loads in extra creatures and food pellets.

Store Tanks / Creatures (w/ Save & Load)

Tanks and creatures should be saved as JSON files to icloud if available.

Poor Performance

App struggles to maintain 60 fps on an iPad Air 1. I'm sure I'm doing something that is way too taxing that I could make more efficient.

Homogenous Tank Syndrome

A tank left to its own devices for many hours will eventually become extremely homogenous. Interlopers can't get a leg up even if they try. I'd like to figure out how to prevent a tank from becoming exceedingly homogenous, perhaps more random mutations.

tvOS UI

• Slide over panel

Auto-resize on rotate

Now that the UI is mostly decoupled from the scene, we should be able to resize the scene on rotate without disastrous consequences...?

Proper pausing

Right now when the game auto-pauses it can cause the creatures to stop thinking properly