Crittertrader

Trade your critters!

Crittertrader is a client program used to swap critters evolved with the awesome Critterding program written by Bob Winckelmans: http://critterding.sourceforge.net

Evolving critters with Critterding takes a lot of processing power. Just to find something that can eat and reproduce can take a few hours worth of churning away. If we can take everyone else's precomputed best critters and improve those, we can work together to produce the best possible critters.

Crittertrader has a server program so you can run a server if you like, or use the default server which should be live and swapping critters right now. To run a server, see the server project here: https://github.com/lesliev/crittertrader-server

Dependencies

I've only tried running the client on (Ubuntu) Linux - but it doesn't have too many dependencies - basically only the Faraday gem. If you have Ruby (probably > 1.9.3) and can install bundler, you should be able to get up and running fairly easily with the commands below.

The client does use quite a few command line programs though: bzip2, bunzip2, md5sum, rm, mv

You'll need git and gem to install.

Running the client

You'll need Ruby, probably any version after 1.9.3 would work. I've been testing with 2.1.1 though.

ruby --version       # should probably be v1.9.3 or higher
gem install bundler
git clone https://github.com/lesliev/crittertrader.git
cd crittertrader
bundle install
bundle exec ./crittertrader

Now crittertrader should upload and download a critter about every 10 minutes.

Configuring Critterding

Crittertrader swaps critters in and out of the default autoexchange directory: ~/.critterding/save/exchange

For Critterding to save and load critters from there, you need to enable 'autoexchange'. I do that like this:

1. Run critterding
2. Press 's' to save a configuration profile
3. Find the profile that was saved (look in the terminal for the filename) and edit it
4. Set the autoexchange interval to something like 5 minutes
5. You probably also want to load and save automatically, to continue previous critters

So these are my settings:

critter_autoexchangeinterval 300
autoloadlastsaved 1
critter_autosaveinterval 300

Then make sure you always start critterding with that configuration file:

critterding --profile <profile-file>