Will there be an option for disabling these new features?
You mean just nix all specialization? Yeah, I suppose that's doable. If you're talking about the substances (fat, muscle, etc.) probably not. That's pretty central.
Maybe it has been suggested before but is something like allowing a bot to select a single command to be performed more efficiently (against lower cost) not a better option? like: .up . specialization store resulting in .up performed at half cost. The multiplier may be adjustable. In order to balance you might want to increase other cost.
The problem here is that bots would probably need some meta information about their DNA that I sort of want to avoid (how many .up do I have? How many were executed last cycle). And a sort of slippery slope argument: if we give them the meta information, and the bots behave optimally (always specialize towards most expensive operations), we essentially have the system I was proposing anyway. Just with the added difficulty of managing the specialization from within the DNA.
The way the DNA works right now, it's almost like we're modeling instinct, with very little low level body control. Every layer of body management we add is another layer of logic that has to be in sync with the rest of the DNA. Like a veggie that changes from motility to shooting for defense. The specialization needs to change, too, for this to be effective but the probability of that happening with a hard coded specialization is rather small.
I've been thinking of it like this: most real life shares something like 80% of their genome (I'm making this figure up, and it depends how far up the tree of life you climb, but it's something like that), because these are well established, well conserved, very low level metabolic genes. Things like converting glucose to energy. So it's like the operating system of life. The remaining different genes are the user level software the differentiates life. For Darwinbots, the we hide a lot of that complexity without exposing it to the bots (reproduction, converting body to nrg, etc.) because doing it incorrectly results in death instead of interesting behavior. I can appreciate wanting to expose more things to the DNA, but I just think it'll result in "lock in" where a species can't adapt because to do so it would need to change behavior and specialization at the same time.
Would it be a bad idea to have a slider control specialization costs. If you had it set at 1 youd get 1 species of veggie like bots. 2 would adjust it so you got 2 species of say a animal bot and a veggie bot. 3 gives you 3 species and so on.
I'm not sure what you mean.