Pre-release. There is no stable save format yet, and a slide written by
one version may not open in the next.
Instruction set version 13. Every genome, scenario and snapshot
carries this number, and one carrying a different number is refused
rather than misread — under another instruction set the same bytes are a
different program. So archives written by an earlier release will not
open here, and this is the number to quote when reporting what a genome
did. It is versioned separately from the release on purpose: it says
what can be read, not what has changed.
Each archive holds the microscope and mm-cli, the headless runner,
along with the scenarios, the genomes and both licences. Nothing to
install: unpack it and run it.
On macOS the microscope is Manic Microbes.app — double-click it.
Elsewhere it is mm-app beside mm-cli. On Linux there is also an
.AppImage: one file, a menu entry, and the only version whose icon
shows up under Wayland. The tarball is the one to take if your
distribution is older than Ubuntu 24.04, since an AppImage bundles the
application and not the C library.
The headless runner is the same everywhere:
./mm-cli run scenarios/soup.ron --genome genomes/ancestor.mm --ticks 50000
A scenario seeds the water and the light but puts no cells on the
slide, so --genome is what makes it a world rather than an empty jar.
The binaries are not signed
Signing costs a yearly Apple developer account and a Windows
certificate, and this is free software written for the interest of it.
So each platform will ask once:
- macOS — "cannot be opened because the developer cannot be
verified". Either right-click the app and choose Open, which offers
the button a double-click does not, or strip the download flag from
the whole folder:xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine manic-microbes-0.4.0-macos-universal - Windows — SmartScreen shows a blue warning. More info → Run
anyway. - Linux —
chmod +x mm-app mm-cliif the archive did not keep it.
Verify what you downloaded against SHA256SUMS if you would rather
not take that on trust.
Requirements
A GPU with Vulkan, Metal or DX12 for the microscope; mm-cli needs
none. 4 GB of RAM for a small slide. On Linux, XWayland if you are on
Wayland.