Two ideas: dummy, puppet master

[Welwordion]

You know I thought could a bot not try to use dummies when a enemy  fires at him to distract the enemy and escape sight?
Like airplanes and submarines use gainst rocket and torpedos.

Second I tought it might be nice to make a Mbot that fixes its center bot and uses his ties to navigate the others instead of normal movement. This could be good in gravity sims and if  you change which bot is fixed enable crawling against gravity.

What are your thoughts? Did I say something that was already done?

[PurpleYouko]

Crawling via fixing and unfixing ties has already been done. Check out my Inchworm MB that I made about a year ago in 2.37.
I doubt it will work properly in 2.4 because the tie commands are not quite fully working yet.

It alternately fixes one end or the other and moves by stretching/shrinking its tie.

Haven't tried your other idea on anything other than large stringy plants though.

[Numsgil]

What tie commands still aren't working?

[PurpleYouko]

tielen1 through 4 for starters.

I was also under the impression that tielen and fixang weren't working the same as they did in 2.37.6

[EricL]

.fixang is working for sure in 2.42.3b.  That was one of the main things I fixed in that version.  .tielen may still have issues.  I have not invested the time (yet) to really investigate it thouoghly although it appearred to be working in the wiki battery bot gene I was testing with.

[PurpleYouko]

Good. Did you get around to doing anything with the internal tie arrays yet?

That would be tielen1 through tielen4 and the same for tieang1 through tieang4.

I had actually wondered if there was an easy way that these could actually be re-written as tielen(1) and so on then make the parser recognise the parentheses as reserved characters so as to enter the values into an array rather than having 4 (or more) seperate sysvars.

I just never got around to working on it.

[Numsgil]

We should be careful of making special cases in the DNA.  If tielen and tieang get special parenthesis, it should be made a main feature of DNA, not an exception.
 
 I also think I might have issue with it in regards to mutation code.

[PurpleYouko]

Agreed. It certainly needs to be global if used at all.

Can you think of any other place where it would be useful to enter DNA values as an array rather than as a series of single values?

How about the eyes?

An alternative to eye1 through eye9 we could allow the DNA to be eye(x).
The program would need to be able to read either kind of entry if we were to put something like this in place.

The possible advantage of this, other than slashing the number of sysvars that we need to define, would be that later versions could easily expand on the current one by allowing many more values for 'x' to be used.

I would think that mutations would be easy enough to work out. It might even make them simpler in some ways.

Also think of all the fun you could have in the DNA by substituting a number in the 'x' position for a variable.

Whole new levels of possible complexity with variables addressing other variable directly  

It was just a thought anyway.