General > Announcements
Version 2.42.6 Released
EricL:
Version 2.42.6 is now available!
Direct Download Link.
Major Changes / Features (in no particular order):
Perf: Poff shots now ignored for collision detection purposes
Shots now bounce off field edges
Postive values of shootval are now Mod 1000
Negative values of shootval are now Mod 7
Graph readability improved
Several bugs and usability issues with high fluid density sims addressed
New Incoming Energy Management features
New Dynamic Cost Adjustment features
New Feature - option to disable shot decay
New Feature - option to disable dynamic bot radii
New autosave features for stipping mutation details and re-using old files to prevent filling up the drive
.delgene now works
Touch senses (.hitdx, etc.) now work
Postive shots now only cost the shot cost instead of the .shootval amount
Perf: Shot collision detection now uses quadratic equation algorithym
Perf: Additional improvements in shot array manipulation
Several fixes for crashing bugs
Numerous fit and finish improvements.
A detailed list of the changes from version 2.42.5 can be found here.
A few words about 2.42.6.
This is a significant release with many new features focused on evo sims. All of the bugs identified here should be fixed except for the virus related issues which will be addressed in the next release. Many thanks to Elite, Testlund and others for their help in identifying bugs and their comprehensive bug reports.
The new features on energy management should provide good control over the energy coming into a sim via autotrophs as a function of the total sim energy. The total sim energy as reported in the tray includes all nrg and body in bots as well as nrg in -2 shots. It does not include energy that has been converted to shell, venom, etc. The nrg ratio displayed in the tray shows the net energy which enterred or left the sim in the previous cycle and should give you a good feel for the rate that energy is enterring or leaving the simulation.
Nrg enters a sim smoothly via autotrophs or discontiniously via new bot creation events, such as autotroph repopulation or when the user manually inserts bots. If you want to avoid large jumps in energy inflow from one cycle to the next, you will want to set the starting energy for your autotrofs low or design yoru sim so that repopulation events are rare. Otherwise, each repopulation event will result in large, discontinious injections of energy.
Nrg leaves a sim through a wide variety of means, the largest being decay of -2 shots which fail to impact a bot. If you wish to run an evo sim where energy is mostly conserved, the new Disable Shot Decay feature is for you. It prevents decay of all shots, making them last until they impact a bot. This also results in a "messy medium", in some ways more representative of biological protozoic organism environments. This will plug the largest vehicle for energy leaving the simulation, but may result is a large number of shots (see the shot counter in the tray) and have an adverse impact on cycles/sec. Using no decay corpose mode will further limit energy loss (in the form of energy converted to body decaying or disappearing from the sim). Note that energy will still leave the sim via costs, bots dying with positive amounts of resources origiginally requiring nrg to produce (such as shell or venom) decay of resources such as slime over time, and several other sources of built in internal energy conversion losses. With the new featrures, these should be quite manageable however for those seeking energy balance in evo sims.
The new dynamic costs features are another new feature area focused on evo sims. There are really two features here that can work independently or together. The first turns off all costs if the bot population (all bots, autotrophs and hetertrophs and corpses and even walls I think) drops below a user defined threshold. The costs stay 0 until the population climbs back above the threshold. This safty net feature can be used to prevent massive extiction and save a delicate sim from going extinct in the middle of the night.
The second feature is more exciting. It dynamically adjusts the costs based upon a user specified target bot population. This can be very useful if you wish to incerase the selection pressure over time as bots evolve for example. The algorithym is a little complex, but basically, a cost multiplier is applied to all costs and this multipler is ratcheted up if the bot population remains over the target population by more than 10% and rachets down if it remains below the target by more than 10%. The sensitivity slider impacts how aggressively the costs are adjusted. Check out the Auto Costs Graph to see how this changes over time.
The two can be used to gether for null evo sims where for example, the 0 cost threshold can be set above the starting population so that costs remain 0 while the population has yet to evolve a replicator, but once the population starts climbing, costs can slowly and automatically be increased, providing selection pressure to evolve say, feeding behaviour or some other energy aquisition adaptation. Combine this with incoming energy management and you can provide selection pressure for evolving better means for competing for a limited resource.
The entire subject of energy and populatuion management w.r.t. evo sims deserves a separate write up which I may get around to some day.
Enjoy!
S.o.G.:
Wow, great!
I'm totally obsessed with Darwinbots now. Work suffers
How do the day/night cycles interact with pond mode light gradients & nrg/cycle? Is there a description of this somewhere?
EricL:
--- Quote from: S.o.G. ---I'm totally obsessed with Darwinbots now. Work suffers
--- End quote ---
Yea..... tell me about it...
--- Quote from: S.o.G. ---How do the day/night cycles interact with pond mode light gradients & nrg/cycle? Is there a description of this somewhere?
--- End quote ---
No description on the recent features, so here you go. I need to put a lot of stuff on the wiki...
So, the way the new stuff works is as follows: day/night cycles (which isn't new) causes the sun to come up and the sun to go down, with a frequency of 2X what you specify, right? (I.e. Day lasts X cycles, Night last X cycles). When the sun is up, each autotroph gets the energy specified per cycle (or whatever other method your using). If your using pond mode, then the energy each veggy receives each cycle the sun is up is proportional to the Intensity you specify and inversly proportional to the bot's depth and the sendiment level you specify. The two new features override the sun. If the sim energy falls below the threshold you specify, it forces the sun up even if it is night, until the energy of the sim gets above the threshold again. Vice versa for forcing the sun down even if it is daytime. Note the sun will be forced down even if you are not using day/night cycles. Note also that if you are using day/night cycles, then the spinning of the planet is stopped and "put on hold" while the override is in effect. I.e. if you have 100 cycles left to go before dawn and the override forces the sun up because the sim energy fell below the threshold, then once it brings the sim energy back up, it will go night again and you will still have 100 cycles to go before the normal dawn.
Oh, and the nrg delta is just the difference between the nrg in the sim this cycle and the average of the past 10. It doesn't care how the energy came in or how it left. It just shows what changed. So for example, you can make the delta go up a lot just by manually adding a whole bunch of bots, autotrophs or not, and the delta will show positive that cycle even if it is night time becuase the total sim energy when up compared to the average of the past 10.
Elite:
This version is brilliant
The new features are very interesting. Allow for much more control over evosim dynamics.
Well done Eric
EricL:
--- Quote from: Elite ---This version is brilliant
The new features are very interesting. Allow for much more control over evosim dynamics.
Well done Eric
--- End quote ---
Thanks Elite. I can't tell you how nice it is to be able to write some new code for a change instead of just fixing bugs...
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