Author Topic: Butched buoyancy in DB2?  (Read 5174 times)

Offline Botsareus

  • Society makes it all backwards - there is a good reason for that
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 4483
    • View Profile
Butched buoyancy in DB2?
« on: June 24, 2016, 06:19:48 PM »
Numsgil, I know I just asked you a question about poison and yet had not had a response. However, here is another one that is also on my mind - might as well ask it now.

Currently buoyancy in DB2 is based on the hot air balloon effect - I recall you where not too happy with it when I implemented it. A robot needs to maintain its 'air' at a certain temperature and sustain an appropriate cost to 'float' at a certain level.

Maybe a better way of doing it would have been like a submarine. A robot needs to swim all the way to the top of the screen to collect air and compress it. It can only collect air while on top of the screen and is charged a cost for doing so. Then the robot can convert the compressed air it collected into buoyancy and float at any level it wants. This would have required a new compressed air sysvar.

What do you think?

P.S.

This change is major enough to require a 2.49 release. and I am getting close to 2.5 which is supposed to be the cpp version. It is just out there to talk about for now.

Offline Numsgil

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 7742
    • View Profile
Re: Butched buoyancy in DB2?
« Reply #1 on: June 24, 2016, 07:08:43 PM »
Animals can largely change their buoyancy at will with minimal cost.  eg: swim bladders.  So I'd just let bots change their buoyancy without any cost.  And maybe corpses lose buoyancy and just sink.  Plus, from a gameplay perspective, I'm not sure the ability to sink or float is valuable enough to have to jump through hoops for.

Offline Botsareus

  • Society makes it all backwards - there is a good reason for that
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 4483
    • View Profile
Re: Butched buoyancy in DB2?
« Reply #2 on: June 24, 2016, 07:38:33 PM »
It is mostly useful to plants in pondmode. I also created a ledge sim that has a shape to keep pondmode vegs on top of the screen. So robots that are not effected by vertical gravity have an easier time feeding on them. I do appreciate your simpler approach. I do want some kind of one time cost proportional to mass though. Good articles. Thank you for your help.

Offline Botsareus

  • Society makes it all backwards - there is a good reason for that
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 4483
    • View Profile
Re: Butched buoyancy in DB2?
« Reply #3 on: June 24, 2016, 07:59:22 PM »
Hmm... But under the system Numsgil proposes gravity becomes a useless factor and buoyancy becomes the equivalent to traveling up or down the screen. I think I will just leave it the way it is now.

Offline Botsareus

  • Society makes it all backwards - there is a good reason for that
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 4483
    • View Profile
Re: Butched buoyancy in DB2?
« Reply #4 on: June 24, 2016, 08:30:06 PM »
I guess this shows the difference between my and Numsgils approaches to Darwinbots. Numsgil wants Darwinbots to be a microbiology simulation. I want it to be a biorobotics simulation.

Offline spike43884

  • Bot Overlord
  • ****
  • Posts: 656
    • View Profile
Re: Butched buoyancy in DB2?
« Reply #5 on: June 25, 2016, 04:11:59 AM »
Heres a solution.
Work it like chloroplasts.
Any air an animal receives while under water will be from the dissolved air in the water (hence why tropical fish tanks have pumps among a few other reasons...)
Anyway, I'm not a complete expert on all the ways they do this, obviously one way is via gills, so more gills would result in more oxygenation.
I'd let you guys sort out the balancing, I presume perhaps the making of gills would cost, but after that its free? Anyway, thats how they get oxygen, then they in reality either use it to respire or be bouyant or both.
Autism can allow so much joy, and at the same time sadness to be seen. Our world is weird, and full of contradiction everywhere, yet somehow at moments seems to come together, and make near perfect sense.

Offline Testlund

  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 1574
    • View Profile
Re: Butched buoyancy in DB2?
« Reply #6 on: July 25, 2016, 12:15:35 PM »
I guess this shows the difference between my and Numsgils approaches to Darwinbots. Numsgil wants Darwinbots to be a microbiology simulation. I want it to be a biorobotics simulation.

I've always had the impression that the consensus was to mimic microbiology as close as possible, and it looks to me like that's the direction it has been going so far. ..which is why I think DB is so friggin awesome!  :balloon:
The internet is corrupt and controlled by criminally minded people.