Hi everybody, here's Vortex from Italy
First of all I'll say that I found DarwinBots while looking for alife games. I was looking for something that could let me do a bunch of things directly to the creatures, not like Spore, that is, in my opinion, too much "arcade". So the reason I play is only for gaming purpose, I'm not a programmer nor a biologist or a scientist whatsoever (I'm law student, to be honest ).
Since I'm not a programmer (I've done a few things with php, nothing special), I'm finding some concepts quite difficult to understand and use properly, but I'm sorting most of them out by myself and with some patience I'm sure I'll have fun.
Now the noob questions:
1. I saw that in the forum there are a lot of topic with the last reply going back by months... I'm sure the project is still alive but how much? Can you estimate how many of you are regularly following the community? Just to have an idea.
About the DNA coding, I'm trying to figure out things mostly by myself and the wiki, but there are some things a wasn't able to find:
2. How does the .eyeX distance work? The wiki says that the value is proportional... proportional to what? "*.eye5 40 <" means the the eye5 (main front eye, as I understood) should be minor than 40. But how do I use this value to calculate and define the distance at which the bot should shoot?
3. Following tutorials, I found this two genes (simplebot1.txt of PY)
[div class=\'codetop\']CODE[div class=\'codemain\' style=\'height:200px;white-space:pre;overflow:auto\']'Gene1. Simple search pattern.
cond
*.eye3 *.eye5 >
start
-70 .aimdx store
stop
' Gene2. Simple search pattern part 2
cond
*.eye7 *.eye5 >
start
70 .aimdx store
stop
I think this is related to the previous question. I understand that the first gene means something like "If eye3 value is major than eye5 value, than turn left by 70" and the second gene is "if eye7 is major than eye5 turn right". But why? I don't get what should be in the eyeX slot and how to deal with it. (at the moment I'm just making my bots dancing around with *.eye5 0 = X .aimdx store )
Thank you in advance for your patience and help.