Author Topic: How does pond mode work?  (Read 4697 times)

Offline Peksa

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How does pond mode work?
« on: February 10, 2008, 01:51:14 PM »
There isn't any wiki-entry on it and ingame help is rather lacking, so it'd be nice to have short explanation on it.

Basicly, what do sediment level, energy scaling factor and light intensity do?

Offline Numsgil

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How does pond mode work?
« Reply #1 on: February 10, 2008, 02:37:42 PM »
Pond mode means that the nrg veggies gets is scaled based on its distance from the top of the sim.  Just like in a pond, where the darker, murky bottom isn't filled with all that much plant material.

Sediment level causes it to get darker sooner as you approach the bottom of the play field.  Light intensity should be fairly self explanatory.  Energy scaling factor isn't an actual setting in the sim, it just changes the scaling for the little graphic to show how bright things are.

Offline Peksa

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How does pond mode work?
« Reply #2 on: February 10, 2008, 03:10:07 PM »
Yes, the basics are pretty obvious, but I was hoping for a bit more accurate information. How is the energy given per cycle calculated in pond mode?

Energy scaling factor is a bit confusing. It should probably say somewhere, that it isn't an actual setting.

Offline Numsgil

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How does pond mode work?
« Reply #3 on: February 10, 2008, 09:16:29 PM »
Is it that you aren't understanding the tooltips?  The tooltip specifically says that the scaling factor effects the "graph to the left", and that the value represents the level of light at which the graph is set to max brightness.  If the tooltips aren't clear, I guess they'll need to be rewritten.  Any suggestions?

If you turn on pond mode, with a sediment level of 0, and a light intensity of 40, it's the same as if you typed 40 in the "nrg per" text box for veggies.  Sediment level should be relatively easy to see the effects of: look at the bar graph to the side of the pond mode.  Set light intensity and the scaling factor to 40.  Change the sediment level (probably manually, the up/down buttons seem broken) and you can tell the changes in light intensity at different depths.

Offline fulizer

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How does pond mode work?
« Reply #4 on: February 11, 2008, 08:47:24 AM »
in oher words sediment level affects the amount of energy per cycle given to bots that are further down
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Offline Peksa

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How does pond mode work?
« Reply #5 on: February 11, 2008, 03:19:24 PM »
Erm... Sorry about that, I never found the tooltip.   The tooltip is fine, it's the user that's the problem :/

So light intensity overrides nrg/cycle if pond mode is activated?

Offline Numsgil

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How does pond mode work?
« Reply #6 on: February 11, 2008, 03:34:27 PM »
Yep.  Well, it might be that veggies get fed from both sources if pond mode is enabled, but I can't remember.  I played with different ways for it to work back in the day, so I'm not sure how it presently works.
« Last Edit: February 11, 2008, 03:36:16 PM by Numsgil »

Offline Testlund

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How does pond mode work?
« Reply #7 on: February 11, 2008, 05:19:04 PM »
This feature seems quite buggy and the settings don't stay put, so I don't know how much the settings affect the sim. It looks like even if you try to set a big difference between the bottom and the top, the difference is very small. I tested with light intensity set to 1 and sediment level to 20 (which seems to be the highest possible setting) and compared a bot at the top and the bottom. The one at the top had 2200 energy while the one at the bottom had 2000. I would like to set it so the bottom bots will only have 16000 energy when the top bots have 32000, if the bots started with only 1 energy.
« Last Edit: February 11, 2008, 05:20:23 PM by Testlund »
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Offline Testlund

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How does pond mode work?
« Reply #8 on: February 11, 2008, 05:42:22 PM »
I did some more testing here. I set it to the values mensioned above, started with three vegs, one at the top, one at the middle and one at the bottom. I'm running with the largest field size. When the top bot reached 32000 the other two had reached just above 15000. So it looks like the gradient field only works to a certain dept. Maybe it's not designed for this field size.
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Offline shvarz

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How does pond mode work?
« Reply #9 on: February 11, 2008, 06:57:51 PM »
Now it comes back to me...  I played with it back in the days...  Yes, the gradient was designed for fairly small fields, so it does not span the whole sim in large field sizes.  One of the reasons I dropped it.

BTW: The pond mode would really benefit from having unusual field sizes, like a large horizontal dimension and small vertical dimension.
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