Help Wanted: Joining The Project

There are many ways to be helpful to the project. I am looking for volunteers in several areas, some of which are listed below. My email is automorphism (at) gmail (dot) com.

Port Maintainer

Right now bioCity has only been, and is being tested and developed on Linux. I would like it to be available to other platforms, and thus I am looking for people to maintain and help the development of bioCity on OS X, Windows XP/Vista, BSD Variants, and any other system besides Linux.

To apply for this position you need to know how to compiler software and some C or C++.

Developer

Once the base program has been completed and the structure verified, the next step is to create additional scenarios. By "scenario" I mean a collection of specific rules that dictate the behaviour of the virtual organisms. The behaviour consists of a function that is called on each update (one call, one timestep). The current base scenario is a simple single-species homogeneous population. Ideas for other scenarios:

• Predator-Prey: Some code already exists but it must be made more rigorous or else created from scratch.
• Evolution: A wide area of interest. This may consist of giving organisms different traits that can be passed down. Mutation could occur or the population could be a sexual one.
• Learning: Allow the individuals to learn in some way by giving them a memory.

These are not specific and are here to give you an idea of what is possible. Programming each scenario involves creating the rules using the C++ language and testing all parts of the scenario for correctness.

UI Designer

Eventually I would like a front-end of sorts, although this is not important until the basic program is more stable. The parameters of each scenario are stored in configuration files, and it would be nice to have a simple parameter editor.

Other Areas

Suggestions and comments are always welcome. If you have any expertise in ecology or simulation programming, please do take a moment to email me if you are interested.

The 32x32 icons here are from the Tango Desktop Project. The logo was made in Inkscape and the website in Vim.