I''ve done few graphical demoes. I''d recommend that you try and work with opengl or directx because you want to do 3d graphics and C++. Also usually in Alife demos you end up having a large population of these organisms and speed is something you want. In highschool I did my first alife demo in Visual Basic. It was pretty from a user stand point but it was pretty slow when many organisms flooded the screen (www.opticuslabs.com/Darwin).

For my 3D alife demos I began with made a terrain and then I set up a Quake like control scheme. Look around with the mouse and move with wasd keys. This was great for the ALife demo where all the organisms were loaded on startup and nothing was destroyed. It became an issue though when I was allocating mass memory for another project where I created a terrain of L-System trees. For that one I had the camera just rotate around the terrain out of my control. Everytime the computer would allocate memory it would slow down and moving the camera during those times it was just so laggy. Ofcourse this could''ve been avoided by allocating a memory pool in the beginning but I was just rushing through to finish.

All my demos are done in d3d because I''m familiar with it. Opengl is fine too so no problems there. Java is viable for alife simulations but I havn''t seen that many 3d ones. Search online for Boids 3d java applets. They''re fairly attractive too. But make sure speed isn''t much of an issue if you do go with Java.

Feel free to email me I love talking about Alife. (Opticus_At_Opticuslabs_Dot_com)

~Wave

I havn''t read those books but Nehe.gamedev.net has everything you need. So in addition to whatever book you get make sure to check there too.

~Wave