Genetics Development - Day 4 - Starting the Genetics

I should say, as this is the last post I am writing in bulk since starting the project, and I hope to do these 'one at a time' from here on, that while I am listing days, sometimes there were multiple days between these 'major days' where thinking happened and some minor testing, but I am trying, at this stage, to do 'goals' for each day I am developing this project.

So on day 4, having gotten absolutely nowhere with the male/female breeding thing, it was time to turn to the genetics side of things and try and wrap my head around that. Boy it was a productive few hours, again a 1am finish, but a happy 1am finish!

So, with the genetics, I had the Panda to refer to, but it turns out it is quite easy to do, I must admit I spent a few hours mapping the traits I wanted a particular way, and I am still only doing a small component of the genetics I want, essentially sex and two varieties of wing type. It took a few hours, but by the end of it, I had flies inheriting traits from parents.

Basically they inherit their sex from one of their parents (normally in it is from the male passing on either an x or y chromosome at a 50/50 ratio, and I think I have that happening already. They also can inherit wing type, and this should be a dominant/recessive pattern of inheritance. Where by if I breed a pure bred wild fly with a vestigial fly all should 'look' wild type, but their genetics should all be heterozygous for wing type.

If I then take 2 of the first generation, and breed them I should get one quarter of the offspring being vestigial and the remaining three quarters looking wild type. I have also started thinking about 'lethal' genes, as that is an important thing to discuss.

At this stage I still don't fully understand what I can, and cannot do in the entity definition, with regards to using tags that I create, I am still using the 'inbuilt' variant and mark_variant tags. Variant is the sex of the fly, and the mark_variant is the skin that overlays that. I have some work to do on the textures, and the models, because I think I may need 3 variables to use in the render controller, which is certainly possible, but I am not ready yet.

I haven't done any solid testing on the current inheritance pattern, probabilities or anything yet. That is actually the plan for day 5, create a few entities, see if I can 'edit their genetics' externally so I know exactly what they are, and breed them multiple times and record lots of data about what happens.

In the intervening days between where I finished on day 4 and am writing this post, I have remembered an experiment I did on these flies at university, that took a whole term to do, because of the life cycles of these flies in the real world, and in theory, if I can get this working. I can replicate that whole experiment, and get the exact same data out of it in Minecraft within about an hour.

So, I am really excited to see how far I can go, how in-depth it can be, and how authentic I can make it. That's it for now, thanks for reading, and if you have any comments feel free to leave them below.