Darwinbots 2.44.05 and DarwinbotsIM 1.1 Released

[Shasta]

I fixed a couple of UI bugs that were prominent in 2.44.04.

• Fixed the crash with deleting the last species in the Species List
• Fixed the crash on the cancellation of loading a sim

Download Darwinbots 2.44.05 here

Along with this I put together a new version of DarwinbotsIM. The big new feature is that you will (hopefully) never have to download another version of it again. This version scans some files on the server, sees if a new version of Darwinbots2 has been released, and then updates itself to be able to scan the memory of the new version.  This version will still prompt you when a new version of DarwinbotsIM is available though. I'll need to put new versions online to add-in features and whatnot (I may add in the Zerobot IM mode Wake requested sometime in the future for example).

Download DarwinbotsIM 1.1 here

I now know that some of my instructions on it in the last post were slightly wrong. If you use Windows Vista or 7, DarwinbotsIM must be running at the same privilege level or higher than Darwinbots2. So if you have DB2 running as Admin or in one of the Compatibility modes, you will need to run DarwinbotsIM as an Administrator. Beyond that though, DarwinbotsIM can just run as a normal user. If you run into any new problems with either of the programs post it in the Bugs section and I will try to take care of it, I'm in and out of having internet over the next two weeks though. (Posting this from an airport.)

[Numsgil]

Hey Shasta, thanks for fixing things.  One thing you can do: use UPX to make the executable much smaller.  Not a big deal either way.  Just something I was doing with more recent releases.

[Shasta]

I put up a new version that is packed. It is about 25% of the old size (~500K v ~2M), it is uploaded at the same address.

[Panda]

You also have to click the DB icon when you put it in ninja mode.

[Shasta]

You can now check the status of IM online.
http://www.darwinbots.com/im/stats.php
This is just a list of sims, I will make this look better and maybe track some stats over time, but for now, this is it 

[Testlund]

May I request another fix for DB?  I'm a bit annoyed with the costs....again...still...

It would be nice if the shooting costs had the same accuracy as the moving costs, like 0.01 instead of rounding it to 1 or 0. As it is now shooting costs are too aggressive. I don't think producing enzymes for dissolving food for digestion should be completely free.

[ikke]

May I request another fix for DB?  I'm a bit annoyed with the costs....again...still...

It would be nice if the shooting costs had the same accuracy as the moving costs, like 0.01 instead of rounding it to 1 or 0. As it is now shooting costs are too aggressive. I don't think producing enzymes for dissolving food for digestion should be completely free.

Are you annoyed with cost resolution (int vs real) or with their relative weight? You seem to be saying a bit of both..

I once did an experiment in an attempt to find cost settings to merge F@ and F3. I ran the f2 and f3 versions of gimmick (f2 modified to have some more naive replenishment strategies) at different cost settings. I did this manually, as I am unaware of an option to run competitions at non F1 cost. I had to increase cost of f2 specifics by a factor of 10 to achieve some sort of equilibrium. Note this was done manually so I iterated between f2 always wins and f3 always wins until I found some  sort of middle ground around 10 for F2 specifics. I probably posted this somewhere here...

[Testlund]

What I mean is that shooting cost rounds to whole numbers and not counting in decimals. This means that a bot that shoots constantly will be dead already after 32000 cycles at the lowest cost setting, if it starts with 32000 nrg. Movement costs are not rounded, so you can set it so a bot can swim around for days before it dies without eating, if you want.

What I would like to try to achieve is some conditional logic. Don't produce enzymes if there is nothing to eat.

[Shasta]

Shot formation cost has been fixed to use a decimal value.

[Panda]

When did you do that?

[Testlund]

When did you do that?

Sorry, but I see no difference. If I set Shot Formation to 0.5 it will charge nothing. If I set it to 0.51 it will charge 1 per cycle. It still rounds the cost to 1 or 0.

[Panda]

Yeah, he has done the change but it won't be till the next version, I guess.