Two new cost ideas

[Anonomous Guest Person]

Cost for existing: A standard, constant cost every single bot has to pay just to exist.

Body Cost: Loss of Body (think like how slime dissipates). It'll be reduced by shell or slime (though shell will grant much more resistance then slime, while slime will just more or less take it's place.)

Both of these will, as of version 2.42.8, hopefully be usable to reduce the impact cancerous veggies have on a simulation.

[EricL]

Cost for existing: A standard, constant cost every single bot has to pay just to exist.

The existing aging cost supersets this.   It is a cost for mearly existing that you can choose to begin assessing at a specific age (including from birth) and can choose to increase logrithmicly over time if you want.

Body Cost: Loss of Body (think like how slime dissipates). It'll be reduced by shell or slime (though shell will grant much more resistance then slime, while slime will just more or less take it's place.)

All costs are paid in nrg today.  While slime, etc. will dissipate, this is not a cost, it's just an artifact of the way slime works.  The Body Upkeep cost is a cost on how much body a bot has.  The more it has, the more it pays, but like all costs, it pays it in nrg.  If it does not contain a gene for converting body to nrg, it will die young and fat.

Keep the suggestions coming, but unless there is a good reason, I am not inclined to add a new class of costs that take from body instead of from nrg.  If you feel strongly, about this, I'd like to better understand the requirement and why the Body Upkeep cost is insufficient.

[Numsgil]

The best way to reduce cancerous veggies is to change the way veggies get payed.  "per kilobody" effectively eliminates the advantage of going cancerous.  The other one, quadratically based, means veggies are encouraged to bulk up on body, really never reproducing (and hence this forms a conflict between the need to reproduce and the advantages not to).

[Anonomous Guest Person]

Ah.. when I meant body cost I was thinking more like dissipation in the environment.
Not really a cost as much as a constant threat, really. It's a mix of "yet another thing to model evolution" and another somewhat flat way to give the world in DarwinBots a somewhat more 'realistic' world.

Not that this world has to be our's or even look like it at all.

Though I do admit it seems to really overlap with Body Upkeep.  Except in this case it transfers the job of actually upkeeping body from the system to the bot.

[EricL]

Except in this case it transfers the job of actually upkeeping body from the system to the bot.

I kind of look at it the other way around.  It's the bot's job today to upkeep nrg not body I.e. to not let it's energy get too low.  Being large has it's advantages (and disadvantages) and storing energy away as body for use on a rainy day is one of those advantages, but if you let your energy get too low, you die, so that is the critical resource bots should watch like a hawk.  We could have the system automatically covert nrg to body and view versa but we don't.  Instead we let the bot choose how big it wants to be.  There are lots of sims where the advantages of being tiny (e.g. hard to hit with shots) outweigh the disadvantages of having a very low body...

If you want body to be a less effecient storage mechaism and trickle away over time, I hear you but I think the Body Upkeep cost handles that pretty much today (though unlike say slime evaporation, it does get adjusted with the other costs when using dynamic costs adndwill get zeroed if you are using a zero cost threshold...).