2.42.3b Now Available

[EricL]

2.42.3b is now available.   Major Changes since 2.42.2:

Genetic Memory is now working.
All Tie operations (except possibly .tieang1-4 and .tielen1-4) should now work.  In particular, .fixang, .fixlen and energy sharing now work and have been tested with the battery bot gene on the wiki.
Collision Detection is now much improved and incorporates 2.5 behaviour.
Stores to location 0 once again cost no energy.
The Battery bot free energy hole is plugged.
trefvars are now populated immediatly and automatically.
The debugging robot "vision grid" can be turned on and off.
2.5 code backported for CompareRobots which helps big bots avoid going sumo.
Authenticated FTP support for Internet Organism Sharing added.  Testing has been limited, but appears to work fine.
Some major and minor bug fixes including fixing a couple of runtime crashes.

Complete details of the changes in this release relative to 2.42.2 can be found here.

Enjoy!

-Eric

[Numsgil]

Collisions seem to be able to generate kinetic energy.  The coefficient of restitution probably needs to be dropped, or it might have something to do with kinematic and impulse based physics simulations interacting inappropriately.

Basically, try running a planet eaters sim.  That should highlight the problem.

[EricL]

Collisions seem to be able to generate kinetic energy.  The coefficient of restitution probably needs to be dropped, or it might have something to do with kinematic and impulse based physics simulations interacting inappropriately.

Basically, try running a planet eaters sim.  That should highlight the problem.

It's the extra push I give deeply penetrating bots.  I'll play some more.

[Numsgil]

In 2.5 the bots are physically projected away from each other (their positions are moved independant of some kind of impulse).  Something like that might be necessary.

[Elite]

Nice work

Works much better

[EricL]

In 2.5 the bots are physically projected away from each other (their positions are moved independant of some kind of impulse).  Something like that might be necessary.

Gotcha.   I've just changed it to modify the velocity directly instead of piling on the impulse vector and you are correct, it works a ton better and I don't need my deep penetration hack.  I want to work on it a little more then drop a 3a release later tonight.

[Numsgil]

It does seem like something of a dirty hack compared to the rather abstracted beauty of 2.4's "everything done through impulses" methodology.  Seems the more I play with things the more every physical law requires its own ways of doing things.

[EricL]

I just put 2.42.3a up on the FTP.  Tell me what you think.

Collisions are better I think unless you use a very high gravity Planet Eaters at which point I think the quantum nature of cycles starts to bite us and we get strange harmonics...

[Numsgil]

Much better.

[Welwordion]

hihi that is funny I starteda planet eater sim to test the new collission detection, and guess what happened all algas besides one were absorbed into the black hole which currently revolves around the black hole like a planet around the sun.
I really would like to show you the picture or send you the sim, but unfortunately there seems to be no atatch option in this post :/.
(note it seemed I saved shortly before the collapse of my star system)

[Testlund]

Welwordion, that's the thing with Planet Eaters. (Why is it called Planet eaters anyway  ) Try setting the values lower, like 0.025. Seems to work better for me. When the veggies grow bigger they start to form a bunch of colonies, and if they don't move (wich my primitive veggies don't do) they will eventually end up in one big colony on the screen. Looks better than the black hole thing anyway.

I'm going to check out 2.42.3a to see how it works. I didn't like the collisions in 2.42.3. A little too bouncy, like they bounce away with greater force than they are being hit. Right now I haven't been testing with Planet eaters in this sim I'm running, but I imagine the new collision function whould prevent my veggies to form colonies. Not sure. I'll check out 2.42.3a later.  

[Elite]

Aha - found it

'Blocked' veggies don't have any collision detection. That's why my bots were going straight through them as if they weren't there.

Bot should bounce off fixed bots, but the fixed bot should stay rooted in one spot.

Hehehe ... with 2.42.3 the bots were bouncing away with so much energy that one veg hitting another could cause a chain reaction  

[Numsgil]

BTW veggies no longer form black hoels in 2.5 with planet eaters.  They now form a kind of weird atom with all the vegs orbitting around an invisible nucleus.  Had to really jack up the planet eaters constant to get that though.  Like 1000.

[EricL]

'Blocked' veggies don't have any collision detection. That's why my bots were going straight through them as if they weren't there.

Bot should bounce off fixed bots, but the fixed bot should stay rooted in one spot.

The code checks for each bot involved in a collision being fixed independently.  A non-fixed bot hitting a fixed bot should bounce off just fine.  Is this not happeneing?

[Elite]

After experimenting I've found that the presence of any blocked bots in a sim somehow disables collision detection.

In a sim with no blocked bots collision detection works fine

Hmm ... I wonder why that's happening.

Try it yourself - check the 'blocked' box for Alga Minimalis and test the collision detection

But wait ... it gets weirder

I am running a sim with:
Alga Minimalis (autotroph)
A bot that does nothing, just sits there
A bot that slowly moves forward

If Alga Minimalis is blocked, collision detection stops working. If another bot is blocked, collision detection works fine, but can sometimes be disabled for the blocked bot

This is really odd