The current version of Fluidiom available on the website has a whole bunch of buttons for building structures, but most of them are for fine tuning and the main ones create new tetrahedrons and octahedrons. These two functions work on the basis of a selected triangle, and an implicit direction (where you're viewing from).

So I decided to add something right into the fabric for this purpose: faces. Before the fabric only consisted of joints (spots in space) and intervals (pairwise springy relationships), and now there are triangulare faces as well. The seed structures have been adjusted so that they contain their faces, and the building functions have been extended to work with these triangular faces. Any face can be the location of a new tetrahedron, in which case that face disappears and is replaced by three new ones.

Also, I've backed off on the idea of sticking to only tetrahedrons, because the structures that result are just not pleasing enough. Tetras and octas mix together really well (they can fill space together) creating more sensible looking and working limbs.

So now what the program does is build either a tetrahedron or an octahedron, given a face. That face will be replaced with either three or seven others, respectively. It really makes sense code-wise to have the building work on the basis of faces.. things have gotten a bit simpler.

Interestingly enough, the fact that faces are being carefully maintained throughout the growth-by-mutation process, they are also ideally fitted to help with the OpenGL rendering! It was really easy to get the face objects delivered to the OpenGL layer, so now the creatures have a skin!

I need to work on the lighting a bit to get better images before another screenshot would make sense, but it's going to be cool-looking.