How can I make a bot that has suffered a mutation to stop recognizing its parent as CONSPEC but still recognize its children?
Cannibots quite often lose their cospec recognition by deleting or changing it so it doesn't work.
I.e.
cond
*.refeye *.myeye !=
start
-1 .shoot store
stop
changes to something like
cond
*.refeye *.robage !=
start
-1 .shoot store
stop
Which means that it won't recognise anything as a friend really but all the other bots using the *.refeye ID would still see it as a friend.
If one of the bots mutates so that it changes the number of eyes it has then you would get the effect you are looking for. The parent that gets the mutation would recognise all it's offspring and vice versa while seeing all the other (unmutated amount of eyes) bots as enemies.
The problem you run into then is that it will probably be shot at birth by its unmutated parent, if it survives it's going to have a lot of problems, it is now one bot on a screen full of enemies, life probably isn't going to be very long for the poor little critter!
For this reason you are unlikely to see a truly 'different species' develop, the mutations that survive, the ones that don't get killed off at birth, are more likely to give you a species that imitates the rest of the bots on the screen and use cannabilism or something to gain an advantage.
Even using .dnalen and all the refvars for ID would miss mutated bots that had changed an instruction rather than adding of removing one. Perhaps if you used the mutation rate button to zero all the 'change' mutations it might work.
Something like a .parent/.baby recognition system would be cool, I could see that being a lot of fun to use in evo sims and possibly changing the mutation trends we normally see.