This podcast episode starts with an audio segment from my visit to Ken Snelson in New York in which we talk a little bit about the definitions of tensegrity, and how it has gotten muddled up over the years. The audio is from approximately when the photo below was taken, because he put this bag of bars on the table as illustration.

The rest of the podcast is all about the new gaming elements that I've come up with, some of them during a brainstorm with my 16-year-old son, who is much more of a gamer than myself.

Pounce: Not only will there be locomotion genes for the different directions as described in the previous podcast, but now there will also be a pounce gene. The idea is that a competition between predator and prey will be resolved by judging which of the two has the greatest altitude at the moment that their radii touch. It's kind of like in platform games like Super Mario where you pounce on things to consume them.

Time: I've finally worked out some of the numbers to be better able to talk about the two temporalities, slow motion on the server, fast evolution on the client. I've taken the server time to be leading, and chosen for having the server do one time sweep every 3 seconds, nice and slow. This works out to 1200 time sweeps every hour, so on the client where you can do a thousand or more time sweeps per second, your client-side evolution is experimenting with the coming 2 to 24 hours. A whole day is 28,800 time sweeps, which is enough to cover some terrain and do a good pounce, and on the client you can see this happen in less than a minute.

Thinking in these temporal terms, you realize that a properly executed pounce will take two or three hours to complete. I think it's potentially exciting to know that all this is taking place when players are offline, however slow motion.

Genealogy: When a predator critter pounces on a prey critter, the prey is consumed by the player behind that critter comes back to life again afterward as a mutated descendant of the predator. The consequences are interesting.

Capable bodies will reproduce their shapes in the population, so even if new players start with random genes (garbage in garbage out) and therefore with hopelessly misformed bodies, they can just be consumed by a good body and return as a descendant.. also probably a good body. Only the growth genes are inherited, so the new player will have to re-train the movement and pounce genes.

But what if you attack and defeat another critter who has already defeated a number of others and therefore already has a bunch of descendants? Well, the defeated critter becomes your descendant as usual, but their former descendants become your minions! There's motivation to attack and win.

It also implies that it will be fairly easy in the beginning for players to saunter around and "eat n00bs". Ha ha. Transforming them into viable bodies for their second life. Eating n00bs is easy, but eating a successful ancestor-of-many will be difficult and rewarding because you inherit everything they had while turning them into your descendant.

Above every body on the planet will be written their minion and descendant counts, so you can see what you're up against.

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