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A point on movement in Darwin Bots

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Anonomous Guest Person:
I've often seen an arguement being used.
That arguement just happens to be that most organisms can't go from one point to another quickly. If their food source vanishes, the organisms that feed off of that food source most often should die along with it.
However, if you watch any Darwin Bots simulation, that isn't the case. Most bots can survive a trip across the field. Even if it's a very large field!
And also, most bots can generally do this rather quickly.
In fact, some energy efficient bots that convert body to and from energy efficiently enough could survive for generations!

It's my belief that this is one of the reasons that stable ecosystems only consist of an omnivoric predator, and a plant that unfortunately usually depends on the system for survival in more ways then one. (Approximately two to be precise.)

In fact, I think that the next challenge will be making a bot that can actually remember things, and pass such knowledge off to children, to the point where in mere generations, the species will have mapped out the entire field.

I'm not technically saying this is all bad, but it does make it less of a life sim. (Though the last paragraph means that there're more forms of evolution, which is good. By the time you read this, I should hopefully have written a point about evolution in Darwin Bots.)

I'm simply saying that, in Darwin Bots, most life forms can, and DO, go from food source to food source plenty of times.
I'm also saying that the advantage to this is that we can develop smart bots, that can map the environment, and gain an intelligence advantage over other bots.
Unfortunately, the consequences to this might make such an advantage useless in practice, since powerful bots can often make short work of everything else.
(Though I suspect that once permanent waste is fixed, powerful bots will be rather inefficient.)

PurpleYouko:
I think one of the biggest problems here is that when veggies are reseeded, they appear in random locations.

Possibly they should appear near to the last veggie that died. This will keep food sources in roughly the same place throughout the game except in F1 mode when we want the food to be well spread out.

I have a couple of ideas how reseeding can be revamped using the "POFF" that dying robots leave behind as seeds that become new veggies after a certsain time has passed.

 :D  PY  :D

shvarz:
One way to fix this is to greatly increase the friction in the system.  But you'll have to re-design your bots for such system.  Larger sizes and/or uncrossable barriers would be nice too.

PurpleYouko:
Larger sizes would be good but we need to work on the zoom function a little.

Another BIG problem with larger sizes is that they screw up the robot's positional functions like .depth, .ypos and .xpos.

As soon as one of the screen dimensions gets bigger than 32000, the whole game just comes crashing down when one of our little bots tries to store it into a memory location.

Possible answer:  Change all robot memory cells from integer to long. Has a lot of knock on consequences though.

 :D  PY  :D

Numsgil:
Maybe for things like depth, xpos and ypos, we store it's egrid location instead of its actual x,y pos.

There are like what, 120 x 90 squares in F1 standard?  That allows for a game 266 times larger than F1 along the x axis.  That's like 764 Million times as large as F1 in area.  All without changing the size of the robot memory array.

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