They have to reach a certain distance in a certain time (physics steps) or they die. If you adjust the "Steps per creature", the first number represents the "check points" the creatures have to reach. The second number represents the total time the creatures have.

Also, you can make the "segment length" longer and that will make for longer legs which helps.

You are correct. The name is just to tie into one of the more exciting moments in the evolution of animals. I am thinking of expanding on the project to have multiple environments which will allow for modeling speciation.

This is a bug. At this point, populations only work if they are multiples (1 / successful parents cutoff) so by default, 20. If you want less, you can go with 16.

Thanks! I had abandoned it, but now I am fired up and am planning to keep working on it.

I intend to put up a FAQ over the weekend that will explain everything. I know right now there's all these settings and some buttons don't work so you can see it was left unfinished.

I'm looking into using Web Workers to speed it up, but another thing you can do in the meantime especially if you plan on leaving it to come back to is set the render to "None". This makes it runs the entire population simultaneously so it goes through the generations at a much faster clip. I've gone up to thousands of generations after leaving it over night.

Unfortunately, the quadrupeds are a bit lacking. They were the last thing I worked on before I gave up and I left them completely unbalanced in the version up there now. I have a local version where they have more joints so they resemble an actual quadruped, but it turns out, evolving a nice horse trot is not so easy :)

I have a suggestion, as I myself was getting grossed out, especially if you increase the thickness of the worms. Set the render to "Wire" and see what you think :)

Hey, I made this! I have not heard of the things you've mentioned but I'll definitely check them out. I'm glad you are messing with the creatures :)