Set colour to memory location

[Elite]

Could we have an option whereby a memory location is chosen, and colours are assigned depending on the value of that location?

So if a bot changes the value in the selected memory location, it changes colour.

It would be useful for telling at a glance which antbots belonged to which colony etc.

[EricL]

I think a .color sysvar is a great idea not just for human recognition of species or intra-sepecies role but for whole host of bot-bot reasons from "I'm poisonious"  advertisement to "I'm in heat" advertisement for sexual reproduction.

I suggest two new sysfars:

.color
.refcolor

.refcolor could also be used for color recognition of other things such as shapes and (once they are visiable) shots.

Won't be in 2.43, but I sure like the suggestion.

[Numsgil]

Traditionally Carlo has been vehemetely against it, which is why it hasn't existed yet.  But feel free to add it.  Personally I'd use .red, .green, .blue instead of trying to overload a single .color.

[EricL]

Do you know why he has been against it?

[Numsgil]

I believe he felt that color was a property used by people to see what's going on in the sim, and shouldn't be mixed with the bots' sense of reality.  Or something like that.  You could probably find the post, he's only made a few.

[Sprotiel]

Traditionally Carlo has been vehemetely against it, which is why it hasn't existed yet.  But feel free to add it.  Personally I'd use .red, .green, .blue instead of trying to overload a single .color.

I guess I agree with him: having .color is useless from a bot's point of view (there's already .out1 and .out2) and will prevent humans from making sense of the sim.

[EricL]

I disagree.  Color opens up a whole catargory of stuff from camoflage to sexual advertisement to relatedness recognition to mimicry.  Having bots set their color and be able to view the color of other bots and other objects and having color influence such things as the visiblity of a bot against a background of liek color would be very powerfull.

Personally, I think there are other, better ways to let the humans see which bots are of the same "species" or to reflect genetic distance between bots, but I will point out that it would be easy to have a toggle between the bot's use of color and the human's use of color.  They need not be the same.

[Henk]

Why not link the .outX/.inX sysvars to colours?

[Numsgil]

That's actually an interesting idea.  But there are alot of in/out pairs...

[Henk]

That's actually an interesting idea.  But there are alot of in/out pairs...

maybe connect the first 3 to RGB?

[EricL]

Or just create 3 new pairs specific to color.  My understanding of .in/.out is that the intent is purely for bot communication.  We may want to attach special logic to color which for example, restricts bots from changing these values too often or charges costs for changes of a certain magnitude or prevents changing or reading at night.  Just seems to me that color is special case.

We are only using 215 of the 1000 sysvar locations (and several of those are dups used simply to map mulitple strings such as .aimsx and .aimleft to the same sysvar).  We have the space....

[Numsgil]

...We have the technology. We can make them better than they were. Better...stronger...faster.

[Henk]

IMHO colours should be invisble to bots at night in pondmode

[Lord Squeak]

I think colours would be a great idea to have.
Not only for the bots, but also for the humans watching.

I've been fiddling around with an 6-sexed organism, which I have divided into 6 different bots, just to make it possible to seperate them.
This in turn leads to all kinds of trouble with one bot out-breeding the others.
I could make a single bot with an sex indicator, but this would make it difficult to see what each sex is actualy doing since they would all have the same colour.