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Digging into the egrid

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Numsgil:
I'm working on the egrid right now.  Currently

A couple of issues:

1.  How should you be able to dig into dirt, etc?  Is it:

A.  Shots.  Maybe a -1 or -6 shot, or maybe even a whole new one!
B.  Ties.  Fire a tie at the ground and begin sucking.
C.  A special new interaction method.

2.  How long should it take to dig?  Pretend you find a grid square packed to the brim with dirt.  What kind of time frame should it take to clear it?

3.  How do you spit it back out?  Where do you store it?  Are you allowed to feed while carrying a load if dirt or whatever?

4.  About how massive is dirt, etc.  I'm thinking that carting around a full load of it should slow you down as if you had built a bunch of shell.  However I don't know what a full load is.  How many trips should it take to clear out an egrid square?

Egrid squares are a little smaller than a regular bot.

2122:
I think ties make the most sense.
I have no idea about the other questions though.

shvarz:
OK, what do we learn from nature?

Who digs dirt? Two diggers come to mind: a mole and an earthworm.

Mole pushes the earth apart.  It applies some energy to move dirt from where it was to some other place.  Would it be possible that dirt from the square containing a bot is moved to neighboring squares?  Bot bumps into dirt - dirt moves.  Other organisms do that too: roots of plants, bacteria....

Earthworm swallos the dirt ahead of him, runs it through his digesting tract and leaves behind.  Less common, but an idea anyway...  And the bot needs to span multiple env.grids...  maybe a multibot?  If we simply allow bots to absorb anything from env.gird, then the head of the worm can "absorb" dirt, then share it back to its butt and the butt would "waste" it.

This is just the first thing that came to my mind.  Let's see if other people have better ideas.

Numsgil:
The system I'm thinking of can allow the 'mole' method of packing the dirt harder at the sides pretty easy.  There's a zone between 'packed hard enough you can't get through it' and 'solid brick of material'.

Earthworm type methods can merge with ant like methods.  They differ only in what is done with the 'eaten' material.  That's my main emphasis.  Trying to get a method for building ant nests.

shvarz:
Hmm, one way is to make "dirt" just another substance on e-grid.  We were thinking about "absorb" commands that would grab a portion of stuff from the current square and place it in the stomach.  These commands would be either very specific, addressing a particular layer of env.grid (say, to absorb only glucose) or very general, where a bot would just grab a piece of "whatever is out there".  Then the bot could digest whatever it can and dump out "waste".  So bots would run out, "absorb" dirt, run back and "waste" it out.

Or we can make special rules for dirt.  Right now I am OK either way.

Maybe special rules is better, because dirt "will" be special - it will have characteristics that distinguish it from all other substances on env.grid, right?

P.S: 2.36.5 runs fine for me for 3 hours already.  It is just 600,000 cycles (becuuse I am running size 12 with > 300 bots), but so far not probs.

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