Yes, because I loooovvee programming the GUI. Thats why I've spent the last few days on it.
2.4.X, if anyone can actually get it to run, is quite stable (minus that translocation mutation bug, which I think I've just fixed...) Once I figure out the GUI problems, it should be as smooth as butter.
I just ran it last night for 12+ hours and it ran just fine, no crashes.
Plus, 2.4 saves a simulation when it crashes, and people should be sending me their crashes so I can fix them...
Why are some robots having a hard time in 2.4? Well, the amount of effort they use to push themselves is now = their acceleration * their mass. That is, it follows actual physics laws.
Likewise with robot sizes.
If everyone thinks that the program shouldn't strive to follow real world laws, and that instead we should just make up stuff as we go, by all means, I'll change it back to however it was working before.
Porting the code to C++ has two primary advantages as far as bug finding:
1. I'll be looking over every single line of code one at a time. I've already found several small bugs this way.
2. C++ doesn't suffer from overflow errors crashing the program.
3. I know C++ better than I know VB. This is also true of 90% of other programmers, and any solutions I find online are almost always in C/C++.
I do my darndest to make DB as stable and clean as possible. If I break a few things in the process, it's just that, part of the process. But since I'm the only one actually doing any work at the moment, well, let's not look a gift horse in the mouth, shall we?
If any of you actually looked at the code I'm producing, and comparing it to the code when I started, I think you'll see that the present code is more readable and maintainable. Basically the code has slowly become a large tangled ball of string, and I'm spending alot of time untangling it. That means all sorts of things may break in the process, but hopefully when I'm done the code is such that it's easier to spot and fix bugs, and changes are less likely to introduce new bugs.
Last but not least, Bots, add your own darn robot placement code, I have better things to do at the moment, have hd better things to do, and will probably have better things to do in the future.