It's been some time since I last updated this project But when I a couple days back viewed the analytics for my profile I realised that this project was by far much more popular  than all the others while having an extremely high seleng for how much it could be improved.

In order to make the game more visually appealing and realistic I introduced apple trees which as apple trees do drop apples which the animals can eat. When testing the game I noticed that the animals more than before stayed in similar places and mostly didn't migrate large distances. I think this was caused by the less spread out nature of the food because it grouped around the trees it had grown att. Which means that the closest piece of food almost always was around the same tree or at least the same group of trees. That can be problematic because it allows large amounts of apples to pile up under isolated tree groups which can cause performance problems. In a future update I will either create a rotting behavior for the apples so they destroy themselves after a while or I will change the animals AI so they don’t exhibit the behavior any more.

Even though performance has probably not improved with the update because of the new visuals, I optimized the whey the animals search for the closest food through only comparing the distance with apples that fell from trees that are in range of the animal. This should in 99% of cases give exactly the same result as the last method while not making every animal measure the distance to every piece of food in the simulation.

link to game below:

https://loco-games.itch.io/simple-evolution-simulation