All organisms now have a small chance to create an entirely new gene while producing a gamete.  Also increased herbivore metabolism and gave herbivores a small chance of eating a plant that they don't match with, since they were dying off too much when a new plant came through and strangled them
have got it to a steady state where the simulation lasts about 8 hours, but there are some things about it that are proving hard to erase.  Plants mutate faster than animals because there are more of them, and they have the advantage when they are not resembling their brethern, so the entire map has a tendancy to become a mishmash of colors. the herbivores multiply too quickly when they resemble their prey, and always cause a boom-bust. also, they tend to loose genetic diversity quickly due to having a pretty small accessible gene pool, which I believe is an inherent illness of the cellular nature of their world.  I'm gonna port everything to pygame and see it makes a performance enhancement, and then possibly create another simulation with discrete movement and higher populations - something more like fish in the ocean
successful port to pygame (that was easy)
Removed ability for plants to bud. removed magic nums from the sim animals, made neighbors know about diagonal
made massive performance inprovements  and other tweeks. still looking for the settings to let it go forever
made massive performance inprovements  and other tweeks. still looking for the settings to let it go forever
Pushed down the chance to eat and pushed down energy required to breed and metabolism.  Seems to be more stable - less extinctions, higher herbivore population
Moved simple sim files to subfolder, also tweaked simple sim - gave a higher chance to eat non-matching colors, but amount of energy obtained is based on how well the colors match.  Seems to help in the endgame due to increased migration through non-matching color areas, but doesn't ultimately prevent extinction.