Eric, if you added a multiple eye ref switch, could you go ahead and add a multiple memloc and tmemloc for multi bots? It would be nice if we could build bots that thought and did stuff at the same time.
Yes, I could do that and yes, I totally agree that it would be nice to have more take place in cycle.
The main reason I think this all would be good - the whole thing I.e. switching the focus eye in cycle, switching the readtie, numtie and yes, tmemloc/tmemval in-cycle - is that I think it opens up or at least greatly increases the opportunity for more complex evolved and/or programmed behaviours.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of one trick pony bots and that IMHO is what a lot of DB has been about or at least used to be about over the years. The bot that got to the top of the leagues wasn't the one with the best or most complex navigation or stalking or hiding behaviour, it was the one that exploited a design flaw that let you force your prey to make 32000 units of venom or took advantage of an unprotected sysvar in the current top opponent or fooled another's conspec recognition system and so on. Bots that had lots of sophisitcated code got whacked by far simpiler bots using one clever trick.
Now, clever tricks are all well and good and have their place, but personally, I would like to see bots compete, be they hand coded or evolved, on a higher level, more sophisticated playing ground where more complex, sophisticated behaviour conveys advantage not disadvantage. I want the bot that that can keep one eye on a shape wall and another on a prey and use the shape as cover and do so reliably without worrying about losing the shape between cycles because it has to switch eyes to see the prey. I want the cat-o-nine tails multibot that can pivot ten tied bot appendages into position to shoot at a prey all at once. I want swimming bots and multibots coordinating many cells at once and so on.
Now that the skelaton of Seasnake is there, most of what I plan to do there going forward is complex behaviour stuff. e.g. curl around a prey so that more cells can fire upon it all at once or curl up when attacked to present less target area and avoid hitting your own cells as you fire back. That kind of thing. Head to head, toe to toe, no tricks involved.
DB is a bascially a time sliced, quantum system. Cycles are quanta. Bots could do some of these things today over the course of multiple cycles, but that would mean that bots with sophisticated behaviours pay a price in that time slows down for them I.e. they take multiple cycles to complete what is logically a single action. This penilizes sophisitcated behaviour and favors one trick ponies. Don't get me wrong, there will always be a place for the small, fast, simple bot that finds and exploits a weakness just as there are biological viruses that exploit us multi-trillion cells organisms. But I'm understandably biased towards multicellularity.