MetaArchaea started life as I was experimenting with OpenCL. Most coders use the GPU compute language to do things like physics or post image processing as it's massively parallel, small kernel size lends itself perfectly to these tasks. The first app I wrote to play with OpenCL however was to
control just under 24k user programmable "robots". Anyone that's ever played CRobots, C++Robots, BRobots, VBRobots, etc, imagine the same game with a whole swarm of "bots" running the same tiny kernels in one playing field at real time.
This kinda evolved playing with some equally nerdy friends to an offline game where two players write code for their bots and they battle it out in massive swarms. This kinda looks cellular and virus like if you display it as a subpixel 2D bitmap so it kinda took on a biological name from
there.
After abandoning this (everyone looses interest after a while) I thought about how this would work as an online game. Obviously having one server would be out of the question as the GPU is tied to one battle so having the logged in users act as "node servers" was the next idea. This means everyone
that plays has their own server..
So a game that needs you to program your own bots and then you get the option of hosting your own server (with your own world design) off the main login server, Well this is where it's going.
Oh and don't worry. You don't need to learn OpenCL XD There will be plenty of pseudo compilers to convert from the most BASIC of code (see what I did there?) XD
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