Oases

The v0.5.0 version sees the implementation of the first mechanism that resembles a game mechanic: oases that host nonsentient organic life (autotrophs and heterotrophs). Ships can now carry vat modules that will allow them to store samples of such life, and to spread them to barren worlds.

Oases run a sort of probabilistic cellular automata inspired by predator-prey simulations (heterotroph-autotroph here, respectively).

Each simulated step consists of two phases:

• heterotroph phase, where autotrophs become heterotrophs (according to the heterotroph reproduction rate, if they have at least two heterotroph neighbors), and heterotrophs become dead cells (according to the heterotroph death rate),
• autotroph phase, where autotrophs can reproduce into a random neighboring dead cell (according to the autotroph birth rate), or become a dead cell (according to the autotroph death rate).

Trophs may be injected into a simulation according to a specific ratio (which currently favors autotrophs).

Trophs may be sampled from a simulation. Only those that exceed a certain population threshold are sampled (to protect against extinction due to oversampling), and this threshold is applied to each cell type according to a specific ratio.

Other notes:

• fixed the lack of indexing on memory components in ECS queries
• separated sprite renderer setup from texture loading (so that it may support more use cases)
• the maximum velocity and acceleration of ships is now determined based on their thrust-to-weight ratio
• replaced ;label JSR2 calls with just label, which will emit the JSI opcode