General > Announcements
Version 2.42.6 Released
PurpleYouko:
--- Quote ---How a special option to 'enable buoyant pond mode', which will overide all your environmental settings to give you an environment similar to 2.37.6's pond mode with buoyancy enabled, setting y-axis gravity and fluid density automatically?
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Good idea Elite....
Oh wait a minute...
Didn't we already have that once before?
Numsgil:
You seem a little combative PY
--- Quote from: PurpleYouko ---And my point is who the hell cares?
As long as the bouyancy controls work the way they are supposed to, I couldn't give a crap what real life says about it.
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The smaller the margin for error, the more precise any evolution has to be to make a bot that can both sink and swim. It changes the fitness landscape. It creates more seperation between any populations of sinkers and floaters. It amplifies extremes.
If you don't really care, you can just set gravity to any value you like.
--- Quote ---I really do not agree with you here and maybe this is why I don't really like 2.4 all that much.
Frankly I don't care about mirroring real physics so lang as the game plays well and does what you would expect it to.
The physics controls in 2.4 are over complicated and confusing. Heck if I was new to the game I would take one look at all those settings and run a mile.
Most of the time I simply can't figure out how to make the bloody things work at all. It's more guess work than anything else unless you really understand every litle detail. I much preferred a simple slider for gravity and for friction. 2.4 is impossibly over complicated. I just don't like it.
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The problem isn't the core physics. That's controlled by very few parameters. The problem comes in the disconnect between the physics tab and the advanced physics tab. Friction is also a little confusing, I'll probably combine z axis gravity and the coefficients into two sliders.
Physics basically comes down to 7 choices for physics in 2.37 and 9 essential choices for physics in 2.4 (2 for friction, 2 for fluid properties, 1 for planet eaters, 1 for Zero Momentum, 1 for Brownian, 1 for bang efficiency, and 1 for gravity).
Probably the physics tab needs to dissappear and have the advanced physics controls replace it.
However, I think you're exagerating to say that physics made more sense in 2.37. How many people had any idea what swimming factor did? You had to look in the source code to figure it out.
I think you're being a little neophobic. You were intimately familiar with the older version's physics and code, and you find it discomforting to find yourself essentially a newbie again in some areas.
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--- Quote ---How hard would it be to just have .setboy increase and decrease the buoyancy of a bot?
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My only concern is in the "automatic" nature of the old version. Shell decreases bouyancy, yet its effects are effortlessly removed by setting bouyancy to 0. Ideally I'd like to see some consequences that have to be weighed. Having setboy be a air bubble or something similar, as you describe, so that it effects final bouyancy instead of overriding it, would be acceptable to me. I'd also like to see some costs involved in increasing bouyancy the same way cost is involved in decreasing it (constructing shell).
--- Quote ---How a special option to 'enable buoyant pond mode', which will overide all your environmental settings to give you an environment similar to 2.37.6's pond mode with buoyancy enabled, setting y-axis gravity and fluid density automatically?
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Which brings up a new point/idea: Several preset default settings you can select. Old school pond mode, F1 default, etc. that automatically set various options to the proper value for you.
PurpleYouko:
--- Quote ---You seem a little combative PY
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Sorry bout that. I've been spending too much time debating at EVC Forums
--- Quote ---The problem isn't the core physics. That's controlled by very few parameters.
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You are right about that. The problem really has very little to do with the actual physics engine. it is all about how intuitive the controls are. I just don't like them in 2.4. I find the controls have little or no meaning until I go into the advanced tab. then they are a littl more like the old stuff.
--- Quote ---Probably the physics tab needs to dissappear and have the advanced physics controls replace it.
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I would definately prefer that.
--- Quote ---However, I think you're exagerating to say that physics made more sense in 2.37. How many people had any idea what swimming factor did? You had to look in the source code to figure it out.
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It didn't really do anything much at all. Supposedly it enabled wiggly things to provide locomotion by wiggling but somewhere down the line they lost the ability to do so. I could never really get my head round Carlo's code that made them do it so I never really managed to re-introduce it.
--- Quote ---I think you're being a little neophobic. You were intimately familiar with the older version's physics and code, and you find it discomforting to find yourself essentially a newbie again in some areas.
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I won't argue with this.
--- Quote ---My only concern is in the "automatic" nature of the old version. Shell decreases bouyancy, yet its effects are effortlessly removed by setting bouyancy to 0.
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Shell was never part of the bouyancy equation. That wasn't by design. It should have been part of it. Increase in shell should undoubtedly cause negative bouyancy which would have to be countered by raising the value in .setboy. Maintaining a non-zero setboy value should in turn cost energy proportional to the difference between it and zero. that too was never implemented but probably should be.
You just have to think of .setboy as a universal all inclusive method of modifying bouyancy. It's one of those things that has no correlation in reality. Bit like shots, ties and so on. It doesn't need a correlation. if we force bots to be realistic then we have to redesign the entire game from the ground up.
--- Quote ---Which brings up a new point/idea: Several preset default settings you can select. Old school pond mode, F1 default, etc. that automatically set various options to the proper value for you.
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That would work just fine provided that the new physics is able to generate a world that mimics traditional pond mode.
I don't know whether the physics are just buggy but I can't make them do anything much at all. Sometimes I change a setting then change it back and it refuses to go back at all. often the only way to get it back is to turn of DB and restart it. I seem to recal Testlund reporting something similar a while back.
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