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Quick Question on C++ DB Version

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rwill128:
So I see there's a C++ port of DarwinBots that never got finished, and I presume development was halted in favor of working on DB3 code.

But I did download the project snapshot posted by Numsgil in 2006, just out of curiosity, a few minutes ago.

Does anyone remember what kind of figures people were expecting in terms of performance boost between VB and C++?

Numsgil:
I'm not sure there was much of one.  Maybe 15%?  It was a pretty straight port and the code in the VB version isn't architected very well, and the C++ version inherited a lot of that (which is a lot of why I dropped it in favor of the current C# codebase).   It was maybe 80% complete, but I don't remember what was left to do.  I imagine I must have left comments for each commit.  Hopefully it can clue you in on what the state of the code was.

rwill128:
Okay. Kind of cool to hear about the history of DB but I don't think I'll even attempt to code the other 20% when we've got this beautiful C# code base to dig in to. I'm starting to like C# a lot more than C++ anyway.


A second question: I've been digging through the forums and trying to figure out which ideas for new ways of modeling environments, metabolism, growth, evolution, etc. are actually going to make an appearance in DB3. I'm also curious how far along those implementations are, as it would be a really cool area to work on and theorize about. (I'm sure almost everyone else agrees, and that's why there's a whole forum for it.)

Numsgil:
I'm aiming for an alpha release sometime in the next two years that will be a bare bones skeleton of a program, and on to that I'll start adding the more interesting elements.  The problem is that it's so fun papercrafting how various gameplay type things might work together it's easy to never actually program the more pedestrian things that are needed to have a working program.  So I've put a personal moratorium on those sorts of features, beyond just acknowledging that I'd like to look in to them at some point.

For an alpha release, my initial aim was to have bots that couldn't connect in to multibots, with only shots to feed and damage each other, and some basic splitting for reproduction, and leave out everything else for later.  I'm kind of cheating right now working on fluid, though. :/

rwill128:
Aw! We should work toward some kind of barebones .exe. Personally I think it would inspiring to see something working, and might also draw more activity into the community.

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