How can I manage or disable this effect in physics/settings? I assumed those settings were "off" since I started with no settings file.
These bots are the product of zerobots. If they can select for fixing themselves against the force of gravity without spending any movement energy, magically, then I can see why they would have selected for that in their previous environment. Right now they need to be falling if they're not moving.
I'll play around with waste settings while I wait for a reply.
EDIT I jacked waste threshold to 20000 and BAM, bots started doing things.
Any advice as to how best to eliminate this problem in the future? What's the maximum value for waste threshold? I tried 32000 and it crashed. Feature request: waste on/off toggle.
EDIT 2 This doesn't work on all the bots in the stable. Some of them just stop and remain fixed, and it happens a lot sooner than waste as I understand it could be responsible. Could these zerobot-spawn have a .fixpos in their genome somewhere?
If a bot can thwart the sim physics and evade morphological costs just by enacting some command in its DNA, that's a major flaw. A bot should not be able to defy gravity without expending energy, and I should not have to penalize other aspects of its dna that don't expend the same amount of energy. I think I understand the idea behind "alzheimers", but it shouldn't defy the laws of physics. If a bot is not doing anything to prevent itself from falling, and the "immobile" flag is unchecked, then it should fall.
Moreover, when a bot hits one of the frozen bots, even if it's a much larger bot, it's like hitting a brick wall. How can anything the bot is doing prevent it from being banged around like the sim physics dictate?