Wator is a biological environment simulator that mimics the lifecycle of living beings — fishes and sharks — inside the homonymous planet "Wator". Time passes in discrete jumps called "chronons" and the planet's surface is split in squares. Each square can either be filled by water, a fish or a shark. During each chronon, fishes swim and move to an adjacent square and sharks do the same while looking for food (i.e. fishes). Sharks survive (and reproduce) only if they manage to eat something every fixed amount of chronons, otherwise they die. On the other hand, fishes can't starve because it is assumed that they can always find some plancton to eat, but they run the risk of being eaten by sharks. Similarly to the sharks, they reproduce every fixed amount of chronons (further details about this project can be found at the Wa-Tor Wikipedia page).
This file contains the instructions for building and executing the program. Equivalent instructions in Italian can be found in the README_wator_italian.txt
Open a terminal, cd into the WATOR/src/ folder and execute either make or
make setup. The output of the command will be the creation of a library
and of the two executables wator and visualizer.
Note: you can revert the folder to the initial state at any time by executing make cleanall, for example when you are done with the execution and you want to remove the executables and all the temporary files.
Open a command line and execute the command
./wator file [-n nwork] [-v chronon] [-f dumpfile]
where "file" is the file the planet will be loaded from (mandatory), while the remaining optional parameters are used to modify the initial configuration of the simulation. Respectively, -n represents the number of workers, -v defines the rate at which snapshots of the planet's state are taken and -f is the output file in which to save them. If not specified, -f is just "stdout".
To end the simulation, one can either send a SIGINT/SIGTERM signal to the process (via command line) or wait for it to perform the predfined number of iterations (10000).
To take a snapshot of the planet's state in a certain moment of the execution, send a SIGUSR1 signal to the "wator" process. The planet's state will be printed to the "wator.check" file.
To load a planet, it is recommended to use the "planet.dat" file. Even though it is initially empty, it can filled by copying the content of some example files under the DATA/ folder, like
planet1.dat, planet2.dat, planet3.dat
To set the life parameters of the planet's inhabitants, just modify the "wator.conf" file. As for the "planet.dat" file, you can paste the content of some example files (wator.conf.1 wator.conf.2) under the DATA/ folder.
Before executing the wator process it is advisable to check that the file containing the planet's initial state is well formed. To do so, one should execute the bash script "watorscript" in the following way
./watorscript [-s] [-f] [file] [--help]
where -s and -f are two optional parameter that count the number of sharks (-s) the number of fishes (-f). Note that you can only specifiy one of them at a time, not both. Finally, "file" is the file that needs to be checked. If the file is well formatted, the script will print an "OK" message (plus an eventual number when either -s or -f is specified). On the contrary, when the file is not well formatted, an error message will be printed.
The --help option shows how to use the script.