14 DAY TRIAL // Artificial intelligence has been fascinating me ever since those old Science fiction movies (Terminator, especially) first appeared in theaters. Nowadays technology makes it possible for the big companies (that afford to pay for state-of-the-art equipment and patents) to build their own robotized mechanisms to perform all sorts of activities in an automated way.
While some games are able to assign advanced algorithms to the characters, so that they perform certain actions, others have advanced and can interpret your behavior dynamically, and change the way the CPU controlled characters behave. It's like saying that a game character is able to think and comprehend.
How would you react if I told you that I've found a program that enables you to create your own, populated and interactive world? Yes, it's true! It's called Artificial Planet.
Working with the program
When starting the program you'll feel like a God: a brand new, unpopulated planet is at your ease, ready to be controlled. The graphic effects aren't the best ones I've seen though. The built-in OpenGL engine renders the images at a very low quality, and if you're looking for a program that will generate satellite-quality images, this is not it. But you can, however, manage this planet and evolve it to be even better than Earth currently is.
The program slows down your computer considerably; if you're running it with the minimum requirements configuration (800 MHz CPU, 256 RAM, GeForce 2 video card) you will definitely have some headaches; it's a little annoying to run it even with a much better configuration: rotating the planet around its axes takes forever, and is always lagged.
When you create the planet, it's empty, but you can easily raise the land, create mountains, valleys, grass, and so on. You can also add plants such as: forest, apple trees, orange trees, fire trees. This will result in an immediate creation of the selected component. If you want to get a more realistic effect, you can choose to plant seeds, and the plants will gradually grow, as time passes. Since we're on this chapter, might as well mention that the time is configurable, allowing you to have it ticking or flowing. As for the planet's aging process, you can set it to be faster, or slower (ranging from 1 millisecond, up to 200 ms).
If you want life to develop on your planet, a sun and a natural satellite must be created. This is easily done from the Galaxy section. Here you can also create asteroids, and a missile defense satellite. When creating a sun, there is a chain of events that will happen: it emits light and heat, thus life will evolve, ice will melt, clouds are generated, and then comes rain, and so on. These events have to be controlled by the processor, thus your system will be busy most of the time.
You can manually configure each of these events; for a whole planet this is quite a burden; but you won't have to build a real-sized planet, with billions of creatures that crawl all over it; a pair of each creature type is enough for your needs (it was enough to repopulate the Earth when Noah built the famous arch, so why shouldn't it be enough for you?)
By now, you and the planet should be ready for LIFE! You can create creatures such as: T-Rex, birds, grazers, fish, ducks, rabbits, tigers, bugs, hawks, mice, turtles, dolphins, crabs, foxes, and so on. You'd better be careful where you place each of them: you wouldn't want to have a duck right next to a fox, or a tiger next to a T-Rex, since conflicts will certainly appear.
For a better view of your world, you need to see what's going on everywhere; you can watch the way things evolve on your planet either from space (it's a nice view, but it doesn't provide any details), from the eyes of every creature that you've created, or you can add robots to supervise all the activity, and see everything that they see (just like having a video camera surveillance system).
If you want to make things look more like contemporary times, you can add natural hazards, such as earthquakes and lightning; also, if you've overpopulated your planet, you can use the "Life killer" option to reverse the action (sure, it sounds creepy, but when natural selection doesn't work well, this is the ultimate solution).
After adding all these creatures, it's hard to know where each of them is located. In order to help you organize life better, you can use the Find tool, which is structured in categories (for instance, if you want to see all the dolphins, simply choose the dolphin icon in the "Find" toolbar, and you'll be zoomed in to the first dolphin that's found, and then the next, and so on.)
The Good
The concept is great: this is a small program (the installation kit is under 7 Mb), which is able to simulate a real planet and many real-life processes. You can zoom in to see the world through the eyes of every creature, and you can control each one as you like.
The Bad
You need a really good configuration in order for the program to run well; even if the optimal requirements are met, the visual effects will not amaze you.
The Truth
It's fun to create and manage your own planet. Who wouldn't like a little power? After a hard day at work with the boss on your back, you can go home, and take out some of the stress on the innocent creatures from this program. Or, you can simply have fun seeing the natural course of life happening. Try it, it's free!
Check out the screenshots below to get a glance at the program in action:
