Bot that gets injured.

[Testlund]

I got an idea. How about making it so when a bot starts to feed from another bot or veggie the one being fed upon should take damage so it starts losing body energy, the same way as corpses do when they release shots.  There could be an option where you can set how much they will lose each cycle after being hurt. They should also not be able to reproduce or feed if they are hurt, but there should be a small chance for them to heal. The more damage they have recieved the less the chance should be for them to heal, or you could make it so they allways starts to heal immediately a certain amount every cycle. The more damage they have recieved, the longer it will take for them to heal. If they heal up then they should continue to work as before. It whould be a lot more realistic. I found that if I set the slider for body/nrg up to about 25 or higher then bots can feed on them all they want but veggies whould be immortal anyway.

Maybe this could be implemented later when you got time, Eric?    ...unless the rest of you dissaprove with the idea.

[EricL]

The way I look at it, we already have all of this, but the nuances have to be evolved, not hard wired and fixed in the sim.

Nrg is the primary limited resource in the sim which bots compete over.   If bot A is feeding on bot's B nrg, that reduction of nrg in bot B is a type of injury.  Lower nrg means less ability to reproduce or even a complete inability to reproduce, depending upon the nrg threshold bots use to do so.  It menas less nrg to do things.  Reduced capability to do things is injury.  Yes, bots can evolve to reproduce at a lower nrg level, but conveying les nrg on your offspring is a disadvantage and likly to reduce funcundity in a competitive ecosystem.  Bots can use body to replenish lost nrg, but they must have the genetics to do so.  Using body to replace nrg is better than not having the ability to do so, but having less body has impact on a bot's ability to attack, less potent feeding, etc.

I'm all for making the resoruces a bot has aquired - nrg level and size in terms of body - more directly relatable to attack / defense ability.  We could for example, create a relatonship between movement speed and the cost to do so, perhaps even a non-linear relationship so sprinting distance X takes a LOT more nrg than walking that same distance even though the latter takes more cycles, but in general, I oppose adding hard wired rules to the system.  If it can be evolved, it should be evolved.

[Numsgil]

We could for example, create a relatonship between movement speed and the cost to do so, perhaps even a non-linear relationship so sprinting distance X takes a LOT more nrg than walking that same distance even though the latter takes more cycles, but in general, I oppose adding hard wired rules to the system.  If it can be evolved, it should be evolved.

Somewhat off topic, but if you enable a sim with a great deal of drag (increase viscosity and density) the bots will find it difficult to keep moving at a constant speed.  The faster you want to go, the more energy you need to continuously expend.  If you set it up such that the sim is turbulent instead of viscous, the bot's will expend energy in a quadratic fashion the faster they go.