General > Biology

Multicellular organisms

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Elite:
In DB, the only thing we have that can hold cells together are ties. This is the only way we can create MBs in DB at the moment.

But what holds the cells of a real-life multicellular organism together?

Numsgil:
The only other way presently I can think to create something similar to a MB would be something similar to what Fish School does (I believe it's in the beastiary).

This link describing Volvox demonstrates the only two methods of MBing that I know of at least.  Sticking together with mucilage and cytoplasmic strands (somewhat similar to ties).

Elite:
Maybe we could get the bots to make 'glue' in the same way as slime that will stick them to other bots.

Or maybe some way of getting the cell walls to fuse?

Numsgil:
I've thought about it, but the main hurdle is that I don't know how the physics would work exactly.  Do cells that are stuck together with sticky something have to maintain a certain orientation?  Maybe they can roll against each other but have to stay at a certain distance from each other (always touching).

If you would do some research on the subject, try to find out more about it, that would be a help probably.

shvarz:
This would require flexible bot shapes, because cells interact over an area.  Two circles can interact only over a single point.

But we can have some intermediate solution.  The simplest one would be to that a multibot gets still shown as a circle (with an area representing the sum of areas of fused bots), but certain portions of its border are designated to individual bots.  The exact rules for movement, shots, energy sharing, damage distribution etc can be worked out. This is a very simple solution and can be introduced fairly quickly, because for such a multibot almost everything (including physics) is going to be the same as for current single-bots.

A step towards more advanced things would be for us to agree on certain pre-determined shapes for bots, based on how many edges they have (triangular - 3, square - 4, and so on up to a certain limit).  Then we define a number of ways n which these shapes can hook up to each other and allow bots to choose from these pre-defined scenarios.

I am not too hot about these ideas myself, but they might work...

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