Show HN: Ecosim – A cellular ecosystem simulator toy for Linux written in C • Hacker News Board

Very cool! However, I don't see why this has to be so specific for Linux from when by judging from the libraries used it can be also compiled for MingW, macOS, Free/Open/NetBSD, QNX and even surprising Haiku.

But a very interesting project nevertheless.

Re: Show HN: Ecosim – A cellular ecosystem simulator toy for Linux written in C

#5

Post by diath » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 8:54 PM UTC

It looks pretty interesting but unfortunately I'm unable to run the demo, getting a crash in glDrawElements which is sort of outside of my scope to address. As a side note the debug symbols flag doesn't get passed to individual C files so the binary ends up without debugging symbols (as a workaround I moved the -g3 flag to CC variable instead).

Re: Show HN: Ecosim – A cellular ecosystem simulator toy for Linux written in C

#6

Post by eigenvalue » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

This seems very cool. I would recommend including an animated gif or link to a YouTube video showing the results of the simulation under a variety of settings/parameters. Also, this would probably get a lot more traction if it used web technologies WASM and webgl. Would be cool to combine this with an evolutionary algorithm similar to the Scriptbots project by Karpathy.

Re: Show HN: Ecosim – A cellular ecosystem simulator toy for Linux written in C

#7

Post by Icathian » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

Seems like a really cool project.

If you're at all concerned with keeping it reasonably easy to find, you may want to know that the name Ecosim is in use by software for simulation modeling of trophic energy flows in ecosystems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EcoSim

Re: Show HN: Ecosim – A cellular ecosystem simulator toy for Linux written in C

#8

Post by connor-brooks » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

diath wrote: post #5

It looks pretty interesting but unfortunately I'm unable to run the demo, getting a crash in glDrawElements which is sort of outside of my scope to address. As a side note the debug symbols flag doesn't get passed to individual C files so the binary ends up without debugging symbols (as a workaround I moved the -g3 flag to CC variable instead).

Interesting. What distribution are you using? On Debian it has been working fine, however on macOS I also encounter the glDrawElements issue. Still working on that.

Re: Show HN: Ecosim – A cellular ecosystem simulator toy for Linux written in C

#9

Post by diath » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

connor-brooks wrote: post #8

diath wrote: post #5

It looks pretty interesting but unfortunately I'm unable to run the demo, getting a crash in glDrawElements which is sort of outside of my scope to address. As a side note the debug symbols flag doesn't get passed to individual C files so the binary ends up without debugging symbols (as a workaround I moved the -g3 flag to CC variable instead).

Interesting. What distribution are you using? On Debian it has been working fine, however on macOS I also encounter the glDrawElements issue. Still working on that.

I'm on Arch running the latest proprietary nvidia drivers.

Re: Show HN: Ecosim – A cellular ecosystem simulator toy for Linux written in C

#10

Post by connor-brooks » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 9:54 PM UTC

eigenvalue wrote: post #6

This seems very cool. I would recommend including an animated gif or link to a YouTube video showing the results of the simulation under a variety of settings/parameters. Also, this would probably get a lot more traction if it used web technologies WASM and webgl. Would be cool to combine this with an evolutionary algorithm similar to the Scriptbots project by Karpathy.

I'm planning to do this once I get my hands on a video capture card! Thanks for the advice :)