Messages

61

Bot Tavern / Advanced Multibot Project

« on: March 28, 2010, 11:43:26 PM »

The normal way to do it is to form the tie on birth, but getting the right tie ID is tricky. You could delay, but that makes physical alignment a factor. Of course, you could always fixpos for a few cycles...

62

Bugs and fixes / Run time error '339'

« on: March 25, 2010, 04:49:43 AM »

Vista and Windows 7 have a large record of failures. Do you have another computer at home that runs XP or an older version of windows?

63

Darwinbots3 / Realease date?

« on: March 22, 2010, 11:49:09 PM »

It's a fine balance-grids would only be more effective if they are used in fairly small sims or if these objects will be used a lot. Either way, we'd need some performance testing and general playing around, and the sim would have to be flexible enough to suit both options.

64

Bot Tavern / Advanced Multibot Project

« on: March 22, 2010, 11:45:50 PM »

Looks like Hydra  
I think tie IDs should be calculated on-site. What I did for the spine is alternate between 1 and 2 so bots only have to remember which one's in front or behind (this should be the first tie formed anyway), then 3 and 4 for tentacles, depending on if they were formed to the left or right of the spine. In this way, you can describe every cell, its function and its position in relation to the spine it's attached to. Tentacle bases would have an extra variable, or a different tie ID, that would signal new cells to act as tentacles rather than spines. I know this sounds a bit overwhelming, but the bottom line is that we need a non-static tie ID at some point, else something like 102 .readtie will become ambiguous and erratic at some point.

65

Bug reports / Version 2.44.04 Delete Species

« on: March 22, 2010, 12:39:35 AM »

Evil AIs get touchy when you don't do as they want you to...

66

Darwinbots3 / DB3 Questions

« on: March 22, 2010, 12:11:24 AM »

Electrical impulses would be the next logical step up from chemical gradients, but I'll settle for just the switchable ties, eh?

                               

In other words, now for the ramble to get some more ideas into circulation:

-About species forking, I don't think too much time should be spent developing a system to handle this. The definition of species is pretty patchy and subjective anyway.

-Mutations can't really be improved, but I would suggest something a little more radical - a type of mutation that would fragment a piece of the DNA and eject it as a virus. This mutation should be extremely uncommon, as it could have a significantly larger effect on an environment.

-Regarding viruses, is it possible to have them accumulate inside a bot until fired or the bot dies? This would be a little more realistic and would make them that much more interesting.

-This is mostly just a detail, but I'm bursting with ideas that will be lost in a few seconds (I had one a second ago that was awesome, but I already forgot)-can enough pressure in the right spot destroy ties? The only real application would be for 'chewing' bits off your prey.

-I heard talk about this before, but I may as well bring it up again-is it possible to have shots that do not directly siphon energy, but rather weaken the cell wall, eventually spilling out the contents of the cell? If so, this shot should probably replace the body shot. This could, in turn, lead to all sorts of different paths. For example, the shots could be modified to either damage the wall immediately, erode it over time, gnaw away on any shells or prevent it from healing, to name a few. Cell walls could be reinforced or protected with a shell; larger bots would have a weaker shell, and more shell would allow less cell growth.

-For senses such as touch, another way of detecting such things is instead of detecting the angle, the cell uses areas (north, west etc.) to determine roughly where it came from, which would encourage MB behavior without making it impossible for bacteria to use these features, and compensate by measuring the magnitude of impact as well?


Sorry about the rambly post, I hope you got at least one useful idea out of it  

67

Darwinbots3 / Realease date?

« on: March 22, 2010, 12:08:59 AM »

The reason I thought of hexagons is that they are the one of the simplest shapes that leave no gaps and fit neatly, so they don't become too much of a nightmare for the physics engine. Why not squares or triangles? Lets face it-I'm a Wesnoth addict  

68

Darwinbots3 / Grapics and user frendliness

« on: March 22, 2010, 12:06:33 AM »

I can think of a dozen ways to tie those in with cell specialization...

69

Bot Tavern / Advanced Multibot Project

« on: March 22, 2010, 12:04:36 AM »

Also, for the bot were making, we need to set a few things in reserve. We need to create a way for a bot to control what it does on the first cycle. We need to set one variable aside that will control which specialized genes activate on each type of cell, some genes might go to multiple cells. My idea was to have a snake like bot that would spawn long tentacles on either side of it that would grow over time when there was nrg and grab food when they saw it. When they grew long enough, or collected enough veggies they would become body cells themselves and spawn more tentacles, like a tree growing branches that grow more branches. Eventually it would grow big enough that some of the branches would "break off" from the larger bot and become a seperate bot entirely. I already have the tentacle cell mostly done, but it still needs genes for feeding and for growing/branching-off.

I think the best way to do it would be this:
 - the tentacles can read from the base 'spine' and use .tmemloc to pass on limited info, but the spine will only read from the brain. In other words, the ten I/O ports are used for head-to-spine and spine-to tentacle information, and .tmemloc has to be used as an eleventh 'reverse port'.
 - the head gives off a signal, which is passed up the spine, increasing every time a cell recieves it, and once it hits the tail, it's bounced back without incrementation. That way, each spinal cell knows roughly its position in the organism and the size of the organism, which can then be transmitted to the tentacles to determine size eg. the larger the organism, the larger the tentacles, and tentacles shouldn't form too far in front so it doesn't interfere with vision etc.
 - The tail cell has to spawn the new tail before becoming a part of the spine - this is marginally more difficult than the standard head reproduction, but solves the problem of functional head-cell issues.


The best way for ties not to break is to use .stifftie and coordinate motion with velocity limits.

70

The Gene depository / Possible to Clone?

« on: March 21, 2010, 11:44:50 PM »

I once made a bot like that called Sentinel - it would make veggies sit in one spot while building up huge defenses, then eat enemy bots and feed the original bots. The major shortcoming I found in the bot is that the larger the viral gene is, the longer it takes to produce, so the bot would only hold out on large sims.

71

Bug reports / Version 2.44.04 Delete Species

« on: March 20, 2010, 09:10:18 PM »

Sounds like the error you get when you try load a species and cancel, and you're left with a blank bot that you have to go back and remove from the list...

72

Darwinbots3 / Realease date?

« on: March 20, 2010, 09:08:41 PM »

Cool, that's a third of my wish-list ticked off  
In case anyone's wondering, the other two are specialized materials, which looks like a definite as well, and hexagonal 'bricks' - these act as minerals that cluster together. With specialized glands, a bot can dissolve these for minerals (shell etc.), and regurgitate them. This would be a sort of abiotic factor in the environment to interact with that would allow bots to build shelters or hives.

73

Darwinbots3 / DB3 Questions

« on: March 20, 2010, 09:05:13 PM »

I was just thinking of most real-life organisms using a chemical gradient to differentiate cells. I also picture a multibot plant that when attacked produces a chemical that quickly transfers through the entire organism, instead of having to send a message one tie at a time.

Another way to solve this which would also help in many more situations would be to make .readtie a command rather than a variable - this way, multiple ties can be manipulated over one cycle. For a more complex organism, chemical gradient would still be the best way to go for reflex responses that have to act rapidly.

74

Bot Tavern / Advanced Multibot Project

« on: March 20, 2010, 09:01:16 PM »

Whoa, so much to address:

Concerning tie motion, it's yet another thing that will be fixed in DB3 - the way I understand it, bots that are tied will be linked surface-to-surface, so they can't really stretch. However, it means turning will affect the entire organism, so would give realistic motion. As a result, turning will require exerting a torque rather than setting an angle (this makes aiming a bit of a pain, but having to develop muscles to flex seems like a good thing.)

I don't really have time to work on projects this year, and I also don't have anywhere to 'playtest' the code, so I'll mostly be dropping handy hints. I tried to make it obvious how the structure works, but if you have doubts, feel free to ask and I'll try my best to explain them.

Oh yeah, and no tie limits, but make sure to give your ties good IDs so the bots can easily find them...

75

F2 bots / Animal_Simplisis (F2) (Tj3)

« on: March 20, 2010, 08:52:35 PM »

Hint-using mrepro in leagues is really bad-usually, mutations move you either up or down the fitness curve, but with hand-authored bots, the only way to go is down.
On the other hand, putting 99 .mrepro into a venom shot could be fun...
 

Do you know about info shots? if you do this for example:

99 .shootval store
.mrepro .shoot store

you can override their .mrepro value for one cycle.