Well, it's been a minute. When NeuraQuarium was last updated, about two years ago (!!) it was reaching a crisis point -- every new feature added more overhead, dragging performance. Tech debt that had piled up over the years also made it harder and harder to change anything, ossifying the codebase. I tried a few different experiments for shaking up the simulation but nothing really took, and I was soon distracted by real-job work and other projects.

But there's too much potential in this weird little alife sim to leave things at that! So now that I finally had some headspace, NeuraQuarium is back with a major revamp -- nothing that wildly shakes up the simulation, but an array of BIG technical and QOL improvements that will bring the sim up to where it should be, and provide the headroom for bigger changes down the line. With this update, NeuraQuarium will be faster, more legible, easier to use and, of course, bigger than ever.

• MASSIVE PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
  • All of the simulation's most expensive systems have been overhauled to continue behaving exactly the same but vastly more performant
    • Brains
    • Scent and heat dispersal
    • Vision and Scent
    • Taxonomy tree rendering
    • File saving and loading, plus file size reductions
• BIGGER Levels and Populations
  • ...Of course, faster performance means we can do more stuff!
    • New, bigger maximum level size
    • Maximum critter population cap setting increased from 750 to 1500
• Overhauled neural net renderer
  
  • Curved synapses for greater readability
  • Synapses animate their signal with per-type styles
  • Hover a neuron and only its connections remain full opacity, the rest of the graph fades
  • Neurosurgery mode: New "click-to-pick" synapse target selection
  
• Visual Field Overlay
  • Hover the "visual center" bar in the Neural Net view to see the selected Critter's vision range and current foveal focus object (the object that feeds "angle" and "Size/prox" input neuron values)
  • You can click the "lock" widget to keep this on without hovering
  
• Taxonomy Tree View Overhaul
  
  • Revamped view with elbow-style ancestry lines instead of straight
  • Also VASTLY faster to render
  • New filtering options, including "show only relatives of living species" and manual collapse/expand controls
  
  • NEW Critter Stat breakdown, visible when zoomed in -- at-a-glance stats for easy comparison (hover to get exact values in tooltip)
  
  • New "AutoTag" feature -- assign cladistic tags to the tree's most significant branches automatically
• New Scent and Heat overlay rendering
  • Old hex-style grid replaced with continuous renderers that are MUCH more efficient (and less chunky)
  
  
• Improved Critter Tooltips
  • That glyph-based stat quickview you saw the taxonomy tree is now on Critter hover tooltips as well
  
  As well as one other place...
• Improved File Handling and Interface
  • Save/Load progress indicators so the game doesn't just freeze (but it's also MUCH faster)
  
  • Previews when selecting a Level, Critter, or Settings file
  
  
  • Only new saves will show the full preview, but all critter saves will work as-is. Don't worry, your old saves are still 100% compatible. Just re-save them to get the preview in the browser.
• Improved Interface for Settings, NeuroSurgery and Critter Editing
  • All numeric sliders now support clicking the number label to bring up manual precision entry fields
  
  
  • Critter body and pattern color sliders replaced with color square click-and-pick fields (you can click the individual RGBA values for manual precise entry
  
• Critter lifespan remaining now visible
  • Narrow yellow drain bar inside Maturity bar shows critter's remaining natural lifespan. "Maturity" text replaced with "Mat. / Long." (for Longevity.) 
  • Similar narrow pink Protein bar inside energy bar
  
• App-wide: "FRUIT" is now "ALGAE"
  • Calling the tiny green dots "fruit" was a throwback to when the only things in the simulation were critters, food, and blocks. Their role in the simulation is clearly more like Algae than "Fruit."
• More Settings!
  • New "Food" tab split off from Environment (now "World")
  • Bug Nutrition, Weed Nutrition, and proper Bug Spawn timer (instead of just "off" or two styles of "tied to algae spawn")
  • Algae spawning now reads per minute instead of "delay between spawns." Existing saves and settings will auto-translate.
  • Nut Nutrition is not changed, but how it READS is more honest now (so if you see different values than you expect, don't panic)
  
• Zoomed-out LOD and "Lo-fi mode"
  • Render less detail the farther we zoom out
  • Manual toggle to keep "lo-fi" potato rendering on even zoomed in
  
• Critter Nibbling Effects
  • Particle sprays show when critters are eating food 
  • Nuts are yellow now, BTW
  
  
  
  
• Various bugfixes and small tweaks, including but not limited to:
  • Agility now gives a bonus navigating weeds, reducing slowdown
  • Tweaks to the value of meat and size of corpses
  • Fixes for physics bugs
  • No more permanent critter tooltip that never goes away
  • Critter vision range greatly expanded (though faraway objects contribute much less input)
• Two new level presets
  • "Rosies" a large level populated by descendents of Risatsirus Roseus on a low-mutation setting -- great for observing brains that are good at zeroing in on food
  • "Big+Rich" a HUGE level with lots of food and accordingly big dumb critters