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question about costs / evo

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Nitus:
I've been having some difficulties in my evo sims in recent versions, specifically the bots expend very little energy doing anything, and absorb energy from feeding at a furious rate.
 
This leads to a situation where there's no evolutionary pressure.
 
In old versions of darwinbots, you could control the costs of movement, of executing a condition, and etc - unfortunately, when I try to bring up the "set costs" menu, darwinbots crashes with a "you need msstdfmt.dll on this machine."
 
I tried downloading it and placing it in the darwinbots directory, and in windows/system32, to no effect.
 
Is there some way to manually configure the costs? Or rather, what lines in the settings file contain those variables?
 
I'd really like to be able to make the cost/consuption ratio more balanced - bots speeding around with little to no expenditure just isn't conducive to evo, and playing with friction and viscosity just isn't balancing it out enough.

Nitus:
Ok, I registered msstdfmt.dll and made it to the menu, but the changes I make there don't seem to be taking.
 
As a test, I jacked up the cost for rotation and toggled "zero momentum" mode, and the bots aren't expending energy despite rotating and changing direction of rotation. The changes I make to the cost settings don't seem to have any effect on gameplay, for whatever reason. I'm using XP pro, if this is realted to the "regional" issue or whatever..

 
I do have a few questions about some of the controls. What is "number" and "*number" and "logic" and what are the differences between the various commands?
 
edit The regional settings aren't the problem, now I've read the "installation issues" page on the wiki. I've disabled "brownian motion. The bots just simply aren't expending energy, despite the cost settings.

Testlund:
If your bots are autotrophs, maybe you're giving them too much energy/cycle? What number do you have in the field for 'Veggie Energy' on the 'General' tab? I think the default value is 5000 which is ridiculous. Set it to 1 and select 'Kilobody point'. Set morphological costs on the costs tab to 1 on everything but body and dna upkeep as a starting point. Then you can tweak it later.

Numsgil:
What happens when you change something in that form, close it, close the options panel, and reopen it and that form again?  Are the numbers you entered still there?

Nitus:

--- Quote ---If your bots are autotrophs, maybe you're giving them too much energy/cycle?
--- End quote ---

I do have veggie energy/cycle set to 1, but this is happening wih animals; my veggies don't do much but get eaten.



--- Quote ---What happens when you change something in that form, close it, close the options panel, and reopen it and that form again?  Are the numbers you entered still there?
--- End quote ---

Yes, they're still there. They just aren't having any effect.
 
I started with no default settings file - is there perhaps some value somehwere that acts as a multiplier to costs, that I might have left blank?
 
Edit Ah, heh, such as "Cost Multiplier". It was set to zero. ;p
 
Soo . . . what's "number" "*number" and "logic" - and what's the difference between basic, advanced, bitwise, and etc?

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