Costs forced on my autotrophs RESOLVED (2.43y)

[Testlund]

When you load this sim you'll see there are 11 vegs left in the sim. I have costs turned off for them. When the population reaches below 10, 100 new vegs will be put into the sim, but they all die because the costs are so hi for my heterotrophs!  

[EricL]

There is no bug here.  Costs are always applied to all organisms, veggies included.  The checkbox on the costs dialog indicates whether veggies should be included in the target population number or not, not whether the costs apply to them.  All costs always apply to all bots.  You have high costs, your veggies can't keep up, they die.

[Testlund]

Ok, I don't know why I have believed otherwise. Maybe because I don't see them getting affected by the ageing cost for instance.
But in any case I think it's strange that these vegs lose energy. The only function they can do (if not affected by altzeimers of info shots) is to shoot energy in a random direction when their energy reaches above 24000, but these will lose energy at random without doing anything already when their energy level is little more than 2000.

[EricL]

Perhaps the body upkeep cost.   Perhaps the turning cost.  Perhaps they get infected with a virus that causes them to do something costly.  There's too many bots in your sim for me to spend the time to root around and find one of the 11 veggies and investigate but as always, if you think you find something, let me know.

[Testlund]

Maybe you're extra busy at the moment but you only need to double-click one of the blue bots, the ones that gets repopulated in the sim, check it's DNA to see that it's only instructed to shoot energy when it reaches 24000. You'll easily see that there is nothing in the sim that can trigger them to just lose energy randomly. Also you'll see they are affected by costx function the same as if the checkbox (include autotrophs in targets) were checked.

[EricL]

Ho Ho!!!!!!   Testlund, my sincere apologies.  You've done it again.   Thank you for being persistant on this and ignoring my gruff manner.   I should know by now that when you smell a bug, there is almost certainly one there.

You have indeed uncoverred a rather serious bug here.  Your veggies are indeed losing too much energy.  It took stepping through the code for the past hour to find out why, but find it I have.  The short of it is, even on cycles where a bot is not actively turning, it still gets accessed the turn cost and whats more, the calculation of that turn cost is incorrect.  The code is multipling the turn cost by the multipler, as it should, but then it multiplies this by the value of .aim alone instead of the delta between .aim and where the bot wants to turn!!!!!!!   You're veggies are getting charged huge amounts of nrg for simply being unlucky enough to be staring in high .aim directions!!!!!!!

Fixed this for 2.43y.

[Testlund]

Ho-ho, and happy holidays!  

Oh, my.... Strange that I haven't seen it until now. I have ran this particular sim for quite some time, though I have restarted it a few times. Glad you found it!