Code center > Suggestions
What should vegs not be allowed to do?
Testlund:
It whould be bad for evosims if veggies were limited and can't evolve into heterotrophs. What about just decreasing the sight radius for them all. I think they have too good vision anyway. It should be more like they sense when they are very close to something, like real organisms.
Anonomous Guest Person:
--- Quote from: Numsgil ---We could add an idleness check. If a bot doesn't reference an eye in X many cycles, the eyes turn off again.
I'm mostly interested in the idea I've had of a veggy "mask". A bot would tie to a veggy and have the veggy perform all its actions, including seeing, feeding, moving, etc. while it looks in the opposite direction and protects the backside. Most bots it would hunt wouldn't be prepared for a predatory veggy.
So long as veggies can have various skills "switched on" I'm okay if they "atrophy" over time.
--- End quote ---
Ah, how I think of it is that if a bot doesn't reference to any eyes, it doesn't have eyes to look through, and thus the only way to bypass that would be to build eyes.
Aka inject the bot with some virus.
How long can a virus that's just cond start *.eye5 stop cost anyway?
--- Quote from: Testlund ---It whould be bad for evosims if veggies were limited and can't evolve into heterotrophs. What about just decreasing the sight radius for them all. I think they have too good vision anyway. It should be more like they sense when they are very close to something, like real organisms.
--- End quote ---
Mm, unless the VB code is already using a grid system for eyes, that won't help much.
I'm not 100% sure but I think that how eyes work now is that they cycle through every other bot and see if the bot should be in sight. Which is why a lot of bots can get really laggy sometimes!
EricL:
The question we are really pondering here is what is the morphological cost to being autotropic?.
In the real world, being an autotroph is morphologically expensive. You have to have billions of chlorplasts to covert light to food. You have to have the real estate to catch to the light. This generally means lots of solar panels, e.g. leaves, lots of leaves. You have to compete for light with other autotrophs which often means growing taller. Supportting such infrastructures in wind and rain requires a lot of mechanical bracing - trunks and roots and branches and twigs. You sacrifice mobility for supportting such superstructure as you need a foundation sunk into the ground and since the energy input you get is still farily low comparitivly speaking, you lead a less energetic lifestlye than non-autotrofs. But the advantages are huge. You make your own food from nothing but light (and air and water). Since you don't have to run and chomp and manevuer to get energy, etc. you don't need legs and heads and teeth and brains. You can be much simpler which means you can surivie massive damage such as grazing or losing all your leaves in the winter and recover.
So, the question we should be asking is if you are autotropic in DB, what do you have to give up? What taxes do we want to impose on autotrophs for the right to gather free mana from heaven as a simulation of the morphological costs of all the equipment biological organisms must have to be autotrpoic? So, while I now agree we don't want to artificially limit the possibiltiy of a carnivouros autotrof or more precisely, one that can see, move, shoot, etc. I do think we want to set up morphological costs such that if you choose to be autotrophic and reap the advantages there of, there is a cost of some sort for doing so.
I think I like the direction AGP is going. If bots had to have some amount of substance (e.g. .photo) in order to be autotrophic and the amount of that something dictated the nrg they received per cycle but there was a cost to having that something in terms of other abilities then that might do the trick. So, what should this cost be?
Numsgil:
I had the idea a while ago of seperating body into three concepts:
1. Muscle increases efficacy of actions (shots are stronger, etc.) Costs nrg each cycle to upkeep. Can be destructed but for only limited nrg retreival. Muscle has alot of mass per little volume, so it tends to make bots sink.
2. Fat simply stores nrg, and has a nearly perfect or perfect conversion rate between the two. Fat has a medium mass per medium volume.
3. Cellulose (or we call it something else) gives plants nrg from light. Cellulose has a huge volume to it.
The idea being that plants swell up to several times the size of bots to be efficient at photosynthesis. Plants have a hard tim maneuvering because of their physical size, so moving costs alot (from drag), shooting is hard (because you can't chase your prey efficiently), and turning is difficult (because of your rotational inertia).
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Remember that bots can address eye5 without having an eye5 in there. For instance "60 5 mult *" would be the same as *.eye5. There are even sneakier examples. So you need to check during the bot's life instead of at its creation.
EricL:
I love the cellulose idea. I had in mind something nearly identical. Perhaps I will protoype something along these lines.
The current code (before my time) counts eye sysvars in the DNA . Period. It re-checks after point mutations and reproduction and anywhere else the DNA could change, but it only looks for explicit sysvar usage. If an organism does not use any eye sysvars directly, as in your example, the current code will not populate the eye values for that organism even if it has sneaky genes to use them.
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