Some Newbie DB Questions

[Rob]

Hi I'm a new to the DB world and it seems like a very interesting sim but I have a few questions. One is more an observation than a question, using 2.43 it seems to crash quite a bit. It will freeze up and I can't click anything and I have to use CTRL-ALT-DEL to close it. Perhaps this was fixed in 2.44 which I'm just downloading now though.

Another question is.. DB seems to be very slow. Maybe this is normal, I don't know, but at 200+ bots it starts getting sluggish, I left it on over night and woke up to thousands of simple bots and it was so slow everything was hardly moving. I'm assuming there's no way to make it run faster, but what do other people do? Disable video all the time? Limit the population somehow? Live with the slowness?

My last question is, where should a newbie be looking for help on using DarwinBots? I've been browsing the wiki, and read about the dna and stack, a little bit of the SimpleBot tutorial too. I'm aware of the sysvar reference but haven't really browsed it yet. Is there anything else I should be looking at ?

Anyway.. I hope I can figure out how to do stuff with DB because it seems quite good..it's kind of complicated at first!

[Shasta]

Hi I'm a new to the DB world and it seems like a very interesting sim but I have a few questions. One is more an observation than a question, using 2.43 it seems to crash quite a bit. It will freeze up and I can't click anything and I have to use CTRL-ALT-DEL to close it. Perhaps this was fixed in 2.44 which I'm just downloading now though.

Welcome to the Forums! When you say 2.43, would I be correct in assuming 2.43.1L? If not I would recommended getting this version to try. Clicky.

Another question is.. DB seems to be very slow. Maybe this is normal, I don't know, but at 200+ bots it starts getting sluggish, I left it on over night and woke up to thousands of simple bots and it was so slow everything was hardly moving. I'm assuming there's no way to make it run faster, but what do other people do? Disable video all the time? Limit the population somehow? Live with the slowness?

Flicker mode and turning off the graphics can help a fair amount, the gains are much more dramatic the lower the numbers of bots however. There is also a button to make it go faster, the "Fast Mode" Button, it is the arrow right next to flicker mode. Limiting the population will help the most though, if you go into the custom costs in the options menu there is a section called Dynamic Costs, this will try to keep the population around your established value by playing with how much each action costs. Other than that, yeah, you pretty much have to live with the slowness.

My last question is, where should a newbie be looking for help on using DarwinBots? I've been browsing the wiki, and read about the dna and stack, a little bit of the SimpleBot tutorial too. I'm aware of the sysvar reference but haven't really browsed it yet. Is there anything else I should be looking at ?

The wiki has some very good information on it, other than that, the DNA - General (and sub-forums) along with the Bot Tavern will probably have the most directly applicable advice. Looking at other bots from the Bestiary can also be a great source of knowledge.

Anyway.. I hope I can figure out how to do stuff with DB because it seems quite good..it's kind of complicated at first!

After the initial learning curve everything gets quite a bit easier to understand, stick with it!

[Numsgil]

Another question is.. DB seems to be very slow. Maybe this is normal, I don't know, but at 200+ bots it starts getting sluggish, I left it on over night and woke up to thousands of simple bots and it was so slow everything was hardly moving. I'm assuming there's no way to make it run faster, but what do other people do? Disable video all the time? Limit the population somehow? Live with the slowness?

Yes, yes, and yes   Basically if you double the number of bots, the sim speed will drop by a factor of 4 (more or less).  After about 200 bots you drop from real time to a few frames per second.  At 1000 bots you drop to about 1 frame per second.  There's nothing much to do but turn off graphics, limit the bots in some way (Shasta touched on this.  Another way is to limit the number of veggies), put it in ninja mode (so you aren't tempted to play with it), and let it run for a few days to weeks.

My last question is, where should a newbie be looking for help on using DarwinBots? I've been browsing the wiki, and read about the dna and stack, a little bit of the SimpleBot tutorial too. I'm aware of the sysvar reference but haven't really browsed it yet. Is there anything else I should be looking at ?

Nope, sounds like you found the right place.  Browsing the forum can be helpful too.  If you have any questions this is a good place to post 'em.

Anyway.. I hope I can figure out how to do stuff with DB because it seems quite good..it's kind of complicated at first!

Yeah, the learning curve is quite steep.  Stick with it

[Ta-183]

Welcome to the forum.

What I can tell you is that yeah, the learning curve is quite a bit steep. What I found easiest to do is go through the bare bottom tutorial, and follow along typing up the code as it goes along. That's how I did it. Now, I have a neat bot in (relatively stalled) development that I just on the verge of making top 5 in F3. Just take it one step at a time. I was planning on writing a DNA assembler interpreter in C++, but I found out today we're skipping the chapter on sequential access files.  AT least my rock-paper-scissors program works.