Simulated Ecology
Simulated ecology gives animals and townspeople territory, routine and memory, so wildlife hunts, migrates and avoids danger, and a settlement reacts to what the player did there yesterday.
Creatures are agents with needs. Each has a home range, a feeding pattern, predators and prey, and reactions tied to scent, noise and line of sight, so a herd disperses when wolves arrive and carrion draws scavengers without anyone scripting the sequence. Human inhabitants receive the same treatment at smaller scale, remembering recent encounters and responding to the player's clothing, cleanliness and local reputation.
Rockstar Studios shipped Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018 with simulation at that density because its subject is a landscape more than a plot, and because budget and hardware permitted spending processing on things most players will never see. Modelling animals whose behaviour a given player may witness once, if ever, is a wager that the aggregate impression of a working ecosystem repays the cost.
Detail of this kind rewards slow attention and frustrates players who want a clean route to the next mission, which is the standard complaint against it. Cost is the deeper issue: simulation at this level is available to a handful of studios, and it does not obviously produce a better game, only a more convincing place. Whether that trade is worth making remains genuinely contested.
Lineage — traced back to a root
Every mechanic in this dataset resolves to an ancestral chain. This one is 3 steps deep, beginning with Day/Night Cycle in 1983.
Descends directly from
Carried forward by 5 later games
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Also called: ecosystem simulation, wildlife ai