DB has encountered a problem...

[Testlund]

  Aaaah!!

Ok... I ran a sim in version 2.42.9g and saved it. Then I loaded the sim in version 2.42.9i. I went into the shapes settings to change it back to how I want it, as it can't be saved in 2.42.9g. I set shapes to black, horizontal and vertical movement, slowest drift speed, bots can see shapes, shapes absorb shots. I didn't change anything in the GUI. Then I zoomed in, doubleclicked on a few bots to check them out. I found a couple of bugs here.
First I found that the first new mutation that a bot gets after the sim has been loaded isn't displayed in the robots dialog, e.g. you see the mutation description if you click on mutation details, but it shows as 0 in the list to the left. When it gets a second mutation it is displayed as 1 mutation.
The second thing I found is that sometimes a bot's vision radius looks like it sees something when in fact there is nothing there to see. I also found that sometimes just ONE EYE have a vision radius like several eyes.
When I was looking at that DB crashed on me.

There COULD have been a small shape hidden by the vision radius though, so I'm not certain on this one.

[EricL]

First, let me tell you that you have evolved some super cool bots in this sim.  Really neat.

So, one by one.

On the mutation thing.  I'm seeing something slightly different that what you describe.  What I see is that the number of mutations that have occurred for the bot is sometimes off relative to the list of mutation details and when it is off, it is always higher than the number of strings describing the mutations.  (What you are describing is the other way around - the number is less than the number of strings - so we may have two issues here.)   What is happening is that I do not zero out the number of number of "new" mutations that have occured to a bot when it is saved in a sim with the "don't save Mutation details" option.  Thus when the sim is reloaded, the bots in the sim which had had mutations occur since they were born (generally point mutations) before the sim was re-loaded will display a non-zero number in the New Mutations, yet the mutation details will have been stripped.  This was intentional on my part.  It seems reasonable to keep the fact that mutations have occurred to a bot this generation even if the mutation detail strings were stripped in the last sim save.  I think this is the right thing to do, but if there are objections, I could change it and zero out the new mutations number when a sim is saved with stripped mutations although that will give the (false) impression that no mutations have occured since the bot was born.

The bot not seeing something in it's eye is a bug I think relating to when the field of vision for an eye spans 0 degrees (I.e. looking to the right of the field).  I'm still hunting this down, but I have witnessed what you describe and I do in fact beleive there is a bug in the new vision routines relating to spanning 0 degrees.  More when I track it down.

The issue with one eye having a wider field of view than usual is *not* a bug.  Your bots have evolved the ability to change their eye width using the new sysvars!  Way cool!

Any crash is a bug by definition (DB should never ever crash, so all crashes are by definition a bug) but this one may be hard to reproduce.  I'll keep trying though...

Thanks for the bug report!  Keep up the great work!

[Testlund]

The issue with one eye having a wider field of view than usual is *not* a bug.  Your bots have evolved the ability to change their eye width using the new sysvars!  Way cool!

Well, that IS kind of cool. I had no idea.  

My sim runs so slow I have a hard time tracking down any interesting behavior, other than they have become pretty good survivors.

[EricL]

Okay, I take back my statement that I think there is a vision bug.  I beleive vision is working correctly.  I was looking at the eyes of a corpse before and once a bot dies, it's eyes are no longer updated so the eye radius display will keep displaying the last eye values the bot had in it's last cycle of life until the corpse rots away, obviously giving the impression that eyes are not working correctly.  I will zero out a corpses eyes in 2.42.9j to avoid future confusion.

Another thing to be aware of is that unless your screen aspect ratio is exactly that used by DB (4X3) there will be cases where what you see on the screen is not the bot's reality.  Eyes will appear to register values for bots that appear to the human observer not to be in that eye and vice versa.  This is because VB displays circles using the aspect ratio of the actual screen resolution, not the field's aspect ratio so if the bots were display as they really are, they and the eye radius thing would be ellispes given the way DB streches the field to fit the display dimensions without actually changing the field dimensions.  One day I will implement custom screen sizes to address this, but today when it looks like the wrong eyes are lighting up, this is probably what is happening.

One more issue to be aware of is that overlapping eyes are now possible and it can be tricky to figure out which eye is lighting up or how wide the eye is just from the graphical eye radius display.  Using the eye button in the bot console helps tremendously.

Let me know if you still think there is a vision bug here.

[EricL]

My sim runs so slow I have a hard time tracking down any interesting behavior, other than they have become pretty good survivors.

Yup.  Lots of shapes that pile your bots right next to each other will tend to slow things down some.  See my post about speeding up evo sims in Tips and Tricks...