World Simulation Update 17-May-2007

Work has been taking up a lot of my time. I've managed to expand the world size from 100 cells to 10,000 cells. So the world is now 100x bigger than before. So I'm up to the equivalent of 1 square kilometer or a Hectare.

I took a shortcut on the display since I haven't had time to work on it. It sends all of the information for the 10,000 cells. No Google map style scrolling. This translates to a very long load time, epically right now with almost 100,000 rabbits in the world. At home with a local connection it takes over 5 minutes. I can't imagine what the timing would be for going out on my DSL connection.

The current simulation has been running for 2 days and has not peaked for the mass die off of the rabbits. I've made a few changes to the database. I added an index on the animal table. When you only have a few thousand rabbits an index doesn't help much. When you have tens of thousands of rabbits an index does help a lot.

I'm estimating that I am now getting at least 300 updates a second. Each rabbit makes at least two updates to the database per cycle, plus the weather update for the land. My estimate should be low since my timing also includes vacuuming the database and running a query that gathers the stats at the end of each day cycle.

After the die off, I'll let the simulation run for a few thousand days. Enough to go through 5-6 die off cycles. I'll then introduce the predator effect on the rabbits. We'll see what effect the predator will have on the simulation. I'll just need to make sure that my daily predator feeding rate doesn't exceed the average minimum daily birth rate. I don't know at this time whether to include a death rate since all of the rabbits tend to die from starvation before they reach an old age and this first predator simulation will eat the oldest rabbit first.

I still need to work on the animal object definition. The expanding of the world has caused me to take another look at how to handle the data being stored on the land, and what information needs to be stored.