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Nutrients, Vitamins and Minerals

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rsucoop:
There should also be a size value for waste. Strong smelling waste, meaning it has more of one type of flavor that, would mask weaker odors, and possibly blend the two wastes together. I'm sure this would really take away from small bot identity, but for Mutlibots this shouldn't make much difference.

Flavors: There are different categories of each; Minerals tend to be less pleasurful, and can be toxic in large doses. Vitamins tend to be sweet and aromatic, sort of like fatty-acids or oranges. Nutrients are neutral and only enhance smells of other smelly particles.

So Minerals overpower Vitamins when =or>.
Vitamins can't overpower minerals, but can be blended if Vitamins are greater per particle than Minerals.
Nutrients blend Minerals and Vitamins.

Each level can be detected and interpreted to decide which waste contains what informaiton about which bot. So if two smells enter a bots' nose, it can use information about what minerals, nutrients or vitamins it may contain.

As far as bio-synthesis is concerned, I think Minerals should only come from veggies, since they eat from the earth. Vitamins and nutrients can be made from fat.

bacillus:
Nutrients are a good idea, but need to establish a balance between availability and difficulty to find. I think that nutrients are made optional; thus, veggies and the like can be used to convert packages of waste into vitamins, have random shapes that contain mineral bubbles, mineral geysers that hurt you in exchange for an abundance off minerals etc. Then, when a bot dies, minerals are released in their normal form, and vitamins are released in the form of waste which can be deposited by veggies which completes the cycle.
 The idea behind the nutrient bubbles is to emulate soil, where plants and bacteria break open the particles by ramming or digesting it, not for food, but to break it up and move it. Nutrients should be more available in more hostile areas eg, the geyser, or areas where its more elaborate to reach them eg. locked in shapes, so that the growth of the ecosystem relies on plants and such first releasing nutrients. Vitamins help build up a secondary food chain, where waste is recycled by plants.

How would smell be implemented, seeing it can come from mulitple directions? The strongest smell is reported in type, bearing and intensity?

Numsgil:
Ah, I am reminded of a feature I wanted to implement with shapes.  The idea being that shapes are made up of a substance (which I called "hard"), which bots can ingest, poop out, and build shell from, but is otherwise useless.  Primarily it was something to be used to build structures with (either by removing it from shapes (ant colony) or building with it (human fortress)).  So I think the idea of minerals is somewhat similar.  Not sure I want to call it minerals though (because the word "minerals" has a lot of real world conceptual baggage that comes along with it).  Maybe we can call it "silicates"?  That allows for real world analogy, like with poison and slime, without too many preconceived notions of how it should fit in to the feature set.

I'm not sure about the idea of vitamins though.  I would like to see some more core substances.  If we take the idea above, silicates can be thought of as a consequence of bot-shape interaction.  I think that's the way to go to add new features.  Instead of making the bot-bot interactions more complex we should try to think of more ways to enrich the bot-environment interaction.  The current combat model (and hopefully my proposed changes to it (basically allowing one bot to swallow another)) strikes a good balance between simplicity and complexity, so I don't want to add too much to it.

I'll have to go back and read the threads in this forum to refresh my memory about the sort of things I wanted to do.

rsucoop:
Wow. Ok.

The VItamin nutrient mineral cycle is nice. And the strongest smell would give the strength and direction, and speed it was moving relative to the object that emmited it.

Calcium is a Vitamin, Vitamin D, which can be used to create a so called exo-skeleton similair to a shell. This means a bot could emit vitamins and minerals at the same time to create different types of materials. The balance between mineral content and vitamin count would mean the difference between a flexible soft shell, or a hard brital one, or even an in-between variation. This would allow for veggies to produce effective exo-skeletons as a multi-bot, empty shells capable of absorbing some nrg, and the minerals are destroyed in shots, meaning the vitamins fall off and the shell erodes. Now we can produce acids and shells, acids would help keep a balance so defensive heavy bots dont dominate because of poor balancing. Acids are made from vitamins and energy. So we have several new shot types to consider:

Acid
Shell
Mineral
Vitamin

Shells should carry alot of mass with them, making them bulkier and slower, depending on the distribution of vitamin to mineral count, minerals are heavier than vitamins (teeth vs quarter). I think this answer some key ideas.

bacillus:
So you won't have shell or slime, but a shell-slime continuum? Could work, but I still think Numsgil's right; the bot-bot interactions are complex enough, and they need to be kept to a level where coding a simple is not an enormous job. Not sure about the bot-environment interactions though; may have to be kept optional so the environment settings don't become too inflexible.
 Not the best place to raise it, but since we are talking about shots, how about a type 1 and type 2 virus? A type 1 virus is standard make-and shoot, while type 2 acts more like a real virus, producing itself in bulk and releasing itself when the host dies. Maybe this can be achieved by not forcing the bot to wait until the previous bot is fired until the next is made.

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