Ties to corpses

[EricL]

Curious why this is not allowed.  Corpses respond to body shots I believe, but no tie can stick to them.  If someone can elighten me on the history here, that would be nice.

Personally, I favor allowing ties to corpses.  Disallowing them puts tie body feeders at a disadvantage in sims with lots of corpses.  If people want bilogical parallels, some speices (including humans) carry around dead prey as a food source or move it from where it was killed (think of a puma with a deer carcus in tree).

[Numsgil]

This is a very old design decision, before my time even .  Probably it goes back to the invention of body shots or even before that.  I believe the reasoning at the time was that since corpses have 0 nrg, tieing to them only makes sense if you're doing it as part of a multibot.  And a bot attacking a multibot shouldn't need to kill all the parts of the multibot to destroy its structure.

Or something like that anyway.

I can imagine using corpses to create large physical structures in gravity to reach the top of a sim.  Just so long as you can't inject nrg into a corpse.  Corpses having 0 nrg are important for recognition purposes.

[Jez]

Sorry, can't remember  

May well have been pre body shots, PY would be the definitive source to answer that question seeing as he created corpses.

I have to say I can think of reasons to allow ties to corpses, even if it is just to create a physical barrier between the bot and the outside world. A psuedo shell if you like.

[Zinc Avenger]

That's a good point above, about not having to kill every last cell of a multibot to break its structure. Perhaps allowing ties to corpses, but upon bot death making sure that all current ties are severed would work.

[EricL]

In current builds (2.42.9e) ties to corpses are allowed and they remain after death.  

I have a differnet take on the killing a multibot issue.  When a biological organism dies, its cells don't all die at once.  It takes damage, from outside or within.  Some cells die, enough that that macro functioning of the organism is impaired beyond it's ability to repair.  But other cells may live on for a long time after the macro organism is dead.

Thus, I don't see an issue with letting ties persist after death.  Killing a few cells in a MB will impair it's macro function.  It will be disadvantaged if it has no repair mechanims (I'm assuming the MB is more complex than the spagetti we see today) and be unable to move or hunt or whatever as well as it did.  In a real sim, where selection is operating, this will probabily kill it.