Code center > Suggestions

Muscles, Fat, and Chloroplasts

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Numsgil:
As per suggested, here's what I'm thinking for dividing body:

1.  Muscles - High density, low volume, helps increase the efficacy of actions, such as the strength of shots.  Can be broken down for a very small percent of the energy used to create it.  There's a cost field for muscle upkeep every cycle.

2.  Fat - Low density, medium volume, a near perfect storage mechanism for nrg, with little or no cost upkeep.  Works equally well in plants or animals (technically the label "fat" is a misnomer for this reason).

3.  Chloroplasts/Cellulose/Some other plant related term - Low Density, High volume, produces nrg from sunlight.  Little upkeep, but like muscle it can only be broken down for a fraction of its creation nrg.

The idea is to seperate the function of body in such a way that plants and animals can exist in a smoother spectrum, but there's still historic inertia preventing a bot from playing both sides easily.

As an added benefit, we could encourage bots to pick a side by increasing the efficiency of chloroplasts as muscle levels drop, and vice versa.

Zinc Avenger:
Is there any real need for "fat"? I can't see an advantage to it. In fact all I can see are disadvantages - the cost of the instructions to store and retrieve nrg from fat, the increased size = increased drag, and a time lag between needing nrg and converting it back. The only good thing about "body" was the increased shot power, and that's been proposed to be the domain of muscle now.

The near-perfect storage system for nrg currently is nrg, that has no upkeep cost and it costs nothing to make available for use.

Might it make more sense to not use fat, but instead make the bot's base size dependent on the nrg it has?

While I like the idea of muscle costing to upkeep, that could kill a bot quite easily. Perhaps something like 1% of the bot's muscle is converted to nrg every cycle if the *.muscle is above 100, so the bot has to keep maintaining it.

EricL:
I would like to avoid things which perpetuate single celledness.  The day is not far away where a 64 core cpu is the norm.  Sims with orders of magnitude more bots will be feasable.  When I think about new features like those here, I ask myself whether it encourages or discourages multibot organisms.

Take muscle.  I think I'm opposed to it as described and would instead prefer simply using nrg directly to increase shot strength.  The reason is that you can imagine the direct nrg methiod encouraging multi-bots and cooperation in that a shooting bot could specialize as a shooter and cooperate with other bots who give up some of their nrg to allow the shooter to shoot very high strength shots that it couldn't otherwise.  With muscle, there is less incentive for cooperation as a forcing factor to gain the advantage of higher strength shots.  There are holes in my argument here, but you seet the perspective I look at these kind of things from.

Chlorplasts I favor as I indicate in other threads.

Fat/body.   I do think a bot should have a nrg storage mechanism.  I'm not sure that should be different than simply nrg itself.   I do think a bot should be able to manipulate it's size and mass.  I'm not sure that should be directly related and/or soley related to the nrg storage mechanism.

Anonomous Guest Person:
I personally like the idea, but have a few major questions:

What'll happen with -6 shots?
Will bots still die if they have 0 of all three body methods?
What values would an average bot we see today have? (That is, what level of muscle would an average bot start with, and what amount of cellulose would a plant have? 1000?)
How useful will muscle be? What about cellulose?

Also...

Zinc: Basically to regulate high levels of energy. 32000 energy isn't a wild dream for all bots. Not to mention -1 shots won't steal fat, so it provides some additional defense against -1 shots.

Eric: Unless I'm mistaken, I think muscle efficiency would mean that it would merely increase the output of how much energy is inputted. For example, I'd imagine a bot with 20 muscle would have to output a lot energy to be a devestating combatant, while a bot with 32000 muscle would have to spend much less. And your example does indeed have flaws; spending energy into muscle is far more specialization then just having energy, and would be an additional upkeep for the whole multibot. This could allow for some unusual multibots, as well... imagine a musclebot lugging around a fatbot and using it to just store energy! And take shots from behind that it'd otherwise suffer.

Additionally, if we go with muscles, may I add a suggestion into the mix?
Anywhere from three to five sysvars. Maybe even one. Perhaps we could limit this as a simulation option, because having just one of these would allow for more specialization and thus increase the usefulness of being part of a multibot, while five would definately lean torwards singlebots.
Basically, it'd direct the focus of your muscle torwards one action, basically giving that action slightly more benefit from the muscle, but everything else a bit less. Of course I haven't quite worked it out yet, so it might not be all that feasible, but I still like the idea.

Jez:
Reminds me of pre-body times;

I am all for adding layers of complication to how a bot works, it adds to the variety of bots that can be made.

One thing you always have to remember is it's not us writing the programme, we have our saviours (EricL et al) our saints (PY) and our Gods (Carlos) and it is up to us to convince them that this is a good idea.

Is this a change that that would have a more benificial benefit than other changes?

To quote EricL "I would like to avoid things which perpetuate single celledness"

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