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Butched buoyancy in DB2?

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Botsareus:
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.

Numsgil:
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.

Botsareus:
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.

Botsareus:
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.

Botsareus:
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.

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