I love watching these beautiful fractals and the idea of letting "natural" selection evolve these sheep for our enjoyment is an idea I envy! :) But the programs is not user friendly and has tons of little annoying bugs. I am just going to spill my thoughts here and you can pick them apart.
*You never know where a sheep start or end so voting for a particular sheep is hard. By the time you have decide to kill it or save it another sheep is playing.
*Killed sheep keep playing and don't seem to be deleted off the computer.
*I never know if I voted or how I voted on a sheep that is playing. A killed sheep should never be replayed, and a saved sheep should be marked as such.
*I would love to be able to browse siblings and living relatives of any sheep in the viewer.
*Why doesn't my computer contribute to rendering? It keeps resetting to "rendering starts in 10 minutes"
*I'd like to know how my voiting compares to other voters. Do I have the same taste as other people? Did the sheep I voted down yesterday survive?
*Maybe I haven't explored the website enough, but I don't get a feeling of how these sheep evolve, how the math works etc.
That's it for now :)
thanks for your feedback,
thanks for your feedback, glad you like it and want to improve it.
killed sheep shouldn't be played again, make sure you have a recent version and in the advanced settings you have it set that a negative vote kills the sheep. it should be the default but maybe it got changed somehow.
also, sometimes it seems like after you kill a "sheep" you see it again, but really it's just another edge into or out-of the same one, so sometimes more than one downvote is required to completely eliminate a particular design.
you don't have to worry too much about exactly what you vote -- since it's taking votes from everyone the mistakes average out. if you do want to be sure, then before you vote hit the left arrow and it will go back and play the previous sheep, wait until you are sure you are seeing what you want, and then press up or down.
each sheep has a web page with its family tree that you can browse, or the name/URL of the person who designed it (eg click on one of the sheep on the right of this page, then click on the "lineage" menu item). there's no automatic way to pull up that page for a sheep from the screensaver, but if you press F4 to bring up the playback status overlay, it tells you the number of the current sheep. you can type that into the web index (the find box at http://v2d7c.sheepserver.net/cgi/status.cgi) and then you can browse all that.
who renders is luck. we have so many users that it only takes a fraction of them to do the work for all. it's green and power efficient in that way, since the results are shared and only a few do the work. when we render an HD piece, then there's lots more to do.
see FLAM3.COM for explanations of the math and algorithm. checking out the lineages should give you an idea how they evolve.