Achilles 1
~~~~~~~~~~

Achilles is a simulation of Darwinian evolution in an extremely simplified
virtual world, that permits freely interacting virtual organisms to fight,
mate, and feed, learning as they go with Hebbian neural networks.

A note on the version number
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The former version numbers were: 0.0.1, through 0.0.5.  I have
written a bit more about the change in version number in the
file "NEWS" and in the "ChangeLog".

What you need to install
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you're running Debian, 'achilles' is available!  Currently (05/31/2001)
it is in unstable and testing, with a new version to fix the alpha
build.  Hopefully it will be in the Debian "woody" release, when
that rolls out!

For everyone else:
Very simply, to install this, you need OpenGL, GLU, GLUT and SDL

If you want the ability to take PNG screenshots, you will need
zlib and libpng in addition.

OpenGL is http://www.opengl.org
but a common free "unofficial" implementation of it is
Mesa3D at http://www.mesa3d.org
libpng is http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html
zlib is ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/infozip/zlib/zlib.html

GLU and GLUT as of now come with Mesa3D
zlib and libpng are usually included with most Linux distributions
The zlib library is named libz.so

SDL is Simple Directmedia Layer and is at
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/projects/SDL/


Platforms
~~~~~~~~~

Right now I've only got it running on Linux/x86 but it should be trivial to
port, to any platform that is supported by SDL, and it can be fairly
easily converted to GLUT only which would make it extremely portable..
but SDL is a much nicer library than GLUT in my opinion.

1:
Fixed for Debian/Alpha

0.0.4:
Ported to Win32

0.0.3: 
Ported to Solaris


Installation
~~~~~~~~~~~~

./configure && make && make install

Should be able to ignore any warnings related to platform-specific libs,
unless it pertains to your platform :)

If that does not work on the Solaris or Win32 platforms, I have included
the old Makefiles for those platforms.  Take a look at them and maybe give
them a shot: make -f Makefile.win32 or make -f Makefile.solaris

Command-line Options
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

achilles [ -v | -h | -x <n> | -z <n> | -f <n> | <n> ]

-v	-  Show current version
-h      -  Show options and default settings
-x <n>  -  The X-dimension width of the world
-z <n>  -  The Z-dimension length of the world
-f <n>  -  The minimum amount of food in the world
<n>     -  The minimum number of organisms in the world

Suggested options:
achilles -x 16 -z 16 -f 10 10

Feel free to experiment - thats what its meant for!


Usage while running
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Arrow keys control rotation around the Y axis and moving forward and back.
Page up/down controls position on the Y axis (up or down)
'p' pauses the program (and greatly increases the framerate!)
's' takes a screenshot, saves it as screenshot.png, so remember to rename it!
'ESC' quits the program


Contact
~~~~~~~

Web Page: http://achilles.sourceforge.net/

Any comments, questions, patches and changes should be submitted to

Matthew Danish
mdanish@andrew.cmu.edu

If you have come up with a port to any other platform I'd be happy to hear
and incorporate it into the main source tree.

Thank you

