Algorithm? Where's your pseudo-code?

Basically, you have organisms. Change them ever so slightly, and then put them into their appropriate niches. How.

I'm going to get to this soon. I've been sick and busy all week.

Hello gentlemen, let's shake off all the cobwebs here and start discussing cool new things, shall we?

The concept of organisms being able to consume a specific resource out of another organism for position into a niche of the food web seems really effective and simple to me. I suspect this discussion revolved around the "creature" food web idea, not cellular, adn since we are currently focusing on this stage, I'm going to start the discussion about cell food webs.

As I stated in other threads I think the cell part fo the engine must be simplified since they are clearly simpler in every aspect, so I propose that we grab the Resource Conversion idea, we simplify it a bit to fit the cells requirements and then we could start to specify wich resources are we going to deal at this scale, and how will build the food web with this variables moving around.

I don't know if it's any tangible food web prototype around, personally I have seen none, so we can use this game stage to build a simple food we, and on top of it the more complex food webs we'll encounter further in other stages.

I'm going to do some research about what resources a cell can use and i'll post some ideas later

Ok, we need to start with roadkill's resource idea, and outline what things in the microbial editor are made up of what resources, and what resources are needed to make them. Each microbe (org) has input and output tags. Input is what it needs to eat, output is what it can provide if something eats it.

And here I thought this idea was shot down like a plane over north korea[/quote]

Or like a rocket over north korea!

For right now, preprogrammed food webs are a no-go. Everything will eat whatever it can, and the food web will be generated by logical possibilities of diet.

Sorry if this is breaking any rules, but what if something like Cretaceous Mongolia happened in thrive, where there was more diversity in Carnivores than herbivores.

Like

Carnivores:
Velociraptor(small swift pack hunter)
Tarbosaurus(large forceful hunter)
Alioramus(mid sized swift loner)
Oviaraptor(varied diet, yet hunted in groups)
Shunvia(tiny hunter of small creatures, etc.)

Herbivores
Sichania(large grazer)
Protoceratops(small herbivore "that supplemented its diet with meat"?)
Saurpod(large browser)
Gallimimus(quick grazer)

Theres more carnivores than herbivores in diversity, and that's the 9 most well-known

It's possible, but rather unlikely. As you mention, each predator has a seperate niche, allowing them to potentially coexist without excessive competition. The main limitation is likely to be that the herbivore populations would have to be huge in comparison the the carnivore populations in order to sustain them.

While theres no reason this couldn't happen in the game engine, it is again very unlikely, and we'd probably have to do a lot of tweaking just to get it to happen, which probably isn't worthwhile.