itch.io

Super interesting idea! The help page in the sim (question mark on the left of the building UI) describes the inputs that the brain uses - and since I have it up, here's the list:

• Distance of creature from the ground
• Current velocity (horizontal and vertical component)
• Rotational velocity
• Number of points currently touching the ground
• Creature's rotation (= the average of all bone rotations)

At least, this is what it generally uses. It also specifies that it may use more inputs based on the task (obstacle jumping uses another input for the distance between the creature and the obstacle).

One other thing is that it says there's two parts to being able to perform a task - how the body is built and how the brain controls that body. It would be nice if there could be a "manual" mode where you can somehow manually control the creature to test whether its given body is even capable of achieving such speeds...but I realize this could be complicated to use, esp if the number of muscles is high.

The first major thing it could be is too many neurons / too many layers. The more neurons you add, and especially the more layers you add, the more generations you need for it to train. Once it does (eventually) get trained, it will perform better than one with less neurons, but the significantly longer training time might not be worth it. I just recreated your guy with the default 10 neurons in 1 hidden layer and am on 22% fitness by generation 100. 

The other thing it could be that the creature is physically not adept at being able to jump or run due to its structure. I modified it as shown below and at generation 60 it's at 28% fitness 

Out of curiosity, what's your technique to generate the distribution of numbers per vertex? 

Great implementation! Ive had a tab open on my phone since I saw you posted it (either on the YT video or a reddit page) and love to occasionally play it :)