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Topics - Numsgil

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16
Announcements / New forum
« on: June 21, 2010, 04:56:51 PM »
So the web server was compromised and we had to wipe everything and start over.  Since we were doing that anyway, we upgraded the forum software to something more open source that should be easier to mod.

We still need to set up the wiki and SVN, but otherwise everything should be back to normal.  If anyone has any issues, email me at Numsgil2002 at yahoo dot com.

17
Darwinbots3 / Help with the code
« on: May 14, 2010, 05:41:52 PM »
I'll be available this weekend to help people get the code set up, compiling, and started on a project in the code base.

I'm in California, so my time zone is PDT (-7 GMT).

18
Announcements / SVN back up
« on: May 11, 2010, 02:11:45 AM »
SVN is now being hosted on the webserver.  Thanks to Shasta for getting it working exactly like I wanted.

The new path for the DB3 SVN repository is http://www.darwinbots.com/svn/Darwinbots3/.

Likewise the DB2 repo is at http://www.darwinbots.com/svn/Darwinbots2/.  I need to change any locations that use the old SVN address, but it's late so I'm not doing it tonight.

19
Announcements / Darwinbots IRC
« on: May 06, 2010, 05:36:22 PM »
Sammeh was nice enough to get IRC working on the web server.

If you go to http://www.darwinbots.com/chat.html you can join using a web browser.  If you have an IRC client, it's just irc://www.darwinbots.com.

#db is the main channel.  I will also listen to #dev if anyone wants to bug me about source code type issues.

BUT!  If I'm logged in as NumsgilAtWork it means I'm at work.  Which means you are not a high priority on my list of priorities for multitasking.  So fair warning: I might just ignore you.

20
Darwinbots3 / SVN vs. Git
« on: May 05, 2010, 06:04:58 PM »
I'm thinking about switching to Git instead of SVN.  Just to do it really, I don't have any other compelling reason.  I'm going to do a test with it and if it seems to work out without any major annoyances, I'll install git on the server instead of Subversion (SVN).

SmartGit is the GUI I'll be taking a look at most likely.

My hope with this is that it'll make contributing easier.  And maybe it's easier to install on the web server than SVN.

I doubt that anyone cares especially, but if anyone has some strong feelings about it (sunk costs into a license for SmartSVN, for instance) let me know.

21
Suggestions / Elo rating + league + bots
« on: April 09, 2010, 05:04:50 PM »
Not sure if this is stupid or not, but I wanted to record this idea before I forget.

Instead of the current system (or in addition to) for handling bots, we could implement an elo rating system or one of the related rating systems.  The primary advantage being that we can assign a numeric score (eg: 1837) to a bot.

22
Announcements / Planned downtime
« on: February 19, 2010, 08:15:51 PM »
Hey everyone.  I'm biting the bullet and making the transition to a different host.  The current plan expires at the end of March, so this makes good timing.

Starting probably either next Friday night PST or Saturday morning PST the web site is down.  I don't make any promises for when it will be back up.  I'll try to get everything up before Monday, but I can't promise anything since I have to work during the week.  If it takes longer than the weekend, it could run to be a week or two outage.

During this downtime, everything will be down.  Forums, wiki, IM, etc.  It also will probably come up in stages when I get it working (forum first probably, then wiki, then IM).

I'll post here again on Friday morning to warn everyone.  I'll also try to postpone taking the forums offline for as long as possible.

23
Simulation Emporium / Numsgil's zerobot sim
« on: December 24, 2009, 12:44:32 AM »
I've started up two (not connected) zero bot sims with 1000 bots each with 1000 0s on two different computers running 2.44.04, and I'm going to let them run for about 13 days while I go home for Christmas.  If anyone would like to join me, I've attached the settings I'm using.  Just change the user seed and off you go.  When I get back I fully expect all instances to have crashed, but on the off case they haven't I should have something fun to share  

Saving settings files is apparently broken, so here's a zip of the sim.  Make sure to change the seed value...

24
Announcements / Darwinbots 2.44.04 released
« on: December 19, 2009, 08:06:27 PM »
I've released a new version which fixes issues with folders being created incorrectly, and I found and fixed the problem that was causing -p files to be produced.

You can download it here.

25
Off Topic / Gource visualizations
« on: December 16, 2009, 11:08:30 PM »
Found this cool visualizer named Gource that lets you visualize SVN commits.

It's not quite as exciting as I thought to watch Darwinbots3 grow, but it's still pretty cool.  I've attached the SVN log for DB3.  Just download Gource and run it with this command line:

Code: [Select]
gource --max-files 10000 --auto-skip-seconds 1 --file-idle-time 99999 --log-format custom darwinbots.txt

26
Announcements / Darwinbots 2.44.03 released
« on: December 10, 2009, 12:14:20 AM »
I have released Darwinbots 2.44.03.  Here's the changes (yes, quite small):

  • Fixed bug in 2.44.03: "-p" folders are no longer created.  Sorry to anyone that now has -p files sprinkled through their computer
  • Darwinbots version information is now stored in only one place.  There won't be any more problems with the version being 2.44.02 even though the caption says 2.44.1.

You can download it from the main site as normal or just click here.

27
Announcements / Darwinbots 2.44.02 released
« on: November 29, 2009, 10:41:38 PM »
Exactly a year since 2.44.1 was released, I've done a bit of bug fixing and released 2.44.02.  Don't expect miracles, but it should be slightly less crashy, especially for internet mode.  As usual, go to the FTP.  If there's a crashing bug that I haven't fixed in this version, go ahead and post in the bugs forum and/or post in old bug reports that aren't fixed.  There's still at least one simulation I'm aware of that crashes, using viruses.  I might get around to improving it but no promises.

Changes:
  • Bug fixes for IM
  • Removed smiley mode
  • Executable is much smaller since I packed it.
  • Executable is available for download raw, without being wrapped in a zip (just save it to the right place and you're good to go)
  • Will no longer crash when trying to remove species from an empty species list
  • The vector magnitude function has been tweaked to be more robust against floating point overflows
  • When IM needs to create a directory, it will alert the user that that is what is going on
  • IM no longer crashes if you don't have a "transfers" folder.
  • IM no longer crashes if there are too many files on the server.
  • Fixed a bug where large velocities could overflow velocity sysvars and cause a crash.

(Changelists 5-15 on the SVN code repository)

28
Darwinbots3 / 1 year anniversary
« on: July 03, 2009, 02:27:26 PM »
Tomorrow, July 4th, at about 3 PM PDT will be the one year anniversary since I started working on the current Darwinbots 3 source code and directories, not counting the work I did on DNA about a year before that.

I figured I'd post a progress report:

Lines of code: 30117

Accomplishments:

1.  There's currently a build system in place I'm pleased with.  It works just by scanning for copies of Visual Studio installed on the computer and using it to compile all the solution files it finds by recursively looking through the source tree.  It manages this just using batch files.  I've seen build systems at two other professional game studios, and I have to say I like this one better than any of those.

If nothing else it's extremely simple (no external dependencies beyond Visual Studio) yet still entirely automated.

2.  UnitTestSharp - I've built a unit testing framework in C# that I use to thoroughly test all the other modules in the code.  It also happens to be written to test itself, which I thought was pretty cool.  Nothing involved with UnitTestSharp, or any of the unit tests I've written, will ever reach the final user, but it helps ensure that the code the final user does get works as expected.  Or at least when it breaks and I isolate the bug, it never breaks in that particular way ever again.

3.  Physics - Lodestone - Physics is only about 30% done, but I've successfully managed to figure out how it will work, which is good since I had no idea a year ago   Also want to thank Prsn since he did a lot of work building the scaffolding for the rest of the physics.  My work on physics has also successfully gotten me a job working at Havok, which is pretty cool.

4.  Math - Azimuth - I've looked around online for math libraries for .NET with appropriate open source licenses, and they really don't exist.  So I built my own   As far as I know, this it's the only MIT-style open source library around that can solve systems of linear equations.  There's still a lot of work to do with it, though, especially for sparse matrices.

5.  Graphics - Work has been started on a vector graphics library.  It's still in its infancy, but when done it will allow you to switch between rendering using GDI (and thus you can run Darwinbots on any computer with .NET) or rendering using XNA (for fancier affects and xbox support).

Future work:
6.  Basically so far the foundation has been set.  Most of the current work invovles fleshing out the middle tier modules (things like graphics, physics, etc. etc.), which are, on a whole, maybe 40% complete.

7.  I still need to figure out a system to profile the code.  At the moment none of it is optimized.

8.  Likewise I need to figure out a system for determining code coverage.  At the moment, I have no way of knowing what sections of the code are untested beyond just having a good memory.

29
Darwinbots3 / Free 12-month XNA Creators Club trial membership
« on: June 06, 2009, 08:06:40 PM »
At some point in the next 12 months I'm going to start playing with Darwinbots on the XBox 360.  When that time comes, for the time being, people will need to have a Creators Club membership to use Darwinbots on the 360.

If you register for the Dream Build Play Competition, you should be able to get a code so you can register for a free 12 month trial of the creators club.  They did this last year as well.  Might do it next year.  So it's a reasonable way to play around with deploying to the 360 without paying the money you usually need to.

30
Darwinbots3 / Vision
« on: May 16, 2009, 03:25:02 AM »
I'm playing with vision and how it might work for DB3.  I'm trying to mimic how real life (mammal) eyes work, without compromising the rest of the sim or making things unfair, etc.  Here's what I'm thinking so far:

Each bot can have up to one eye per side (so up to four total).  The exact position of the eye on the side is something a bot can control, but probably not change easily.  All eyes have a fixed field of view (something slightly less than 180 degrees probably), but they can also swivel in their sockets.

A bot eye has rods distributed along the periphery of the eye, and cones in the center.  How far center the transition from cones to rods is can be controlled by the bot, but again not changed easily.  Rods are extremely sensitive, so they're good at picking out faint objects (small bots or large bots very far away).  Especially if those faint objects are moving.  But they're lousy at determining details, so most of the refvars won't display for those objects.  Cones are less sensitive, so a bot has to be much closer to use them.  But they're very good at picking up detail, so refvars will display for whatever it's looking at.

The overall sensitivity of the eye is again something a bot can set, but not change easily.  With more sensitive eyes coming with a higher price somehow.

If a bot arranges its eyes so that the fields of view overlap, the range is extended for both rods and cones that are in the overlap area by the "quadratic summation model": [img class=\"tex\" src=\"http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com/mathtex.cgi?\sqrt{S_1^2 + S_2^2}\" alt=\"LaTeX: \sqrt{S_1^2 + S_2^2}\" /] ([img class=\"tex\" src=\"http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com/mathtex.cgi?S_n\" alt=\"LaTeX: S_n\" /] is the sensitivity of the nth eye) (source).  So binocular vision allows you to detect objects and determine details farther out than stereoscopic vision.  But it also means you can't look over your shoulder easily, so to speak.  And you also probably need to physically orient yourself in order to use it.

Each bot has "system codules" for vision.  One codule handles signals from the rods.  For every object visible by the rods the rod codule gets called, and the relevant sysvars are updated.  The objects are sorted from most peripheral to most center so a bot can overwrite commands issued for more peripheral objects with commands to handle more center objects.  Likewise for cones, a cone codule gets called after all rod vision commands are finished.  With objects getting called from most peripheral first to most center last.  Once the vision codules are finished, the rest of the DNA starts executing.  So vision happens before any other DNA gets called.

An eye can potentially see infinitely far away, dependent only on the  apparent size of what it's looking at.  So as bots are idling because they don't see anything,  the veggies might grow large enough to become visible and the bot can  go off chasing it.  Likewise lots of smaller veggies clumped together might also become visible as the clump gets more and more bots.  Probably the way it would work is that rods are sort of like how non eye5s work right now, but with higher resolution.  If enough rods have the same value, it registers.  Otherwise it's ignored.  Or maybe rods normally have a random static signal, and a bot has to do signal analysis in its DNA to determine what might be a signal or not (maybe its a codule which gets called before the other vision codules I mentioned above).  Or maybe a bot just sets a threshold for how statistically significant a signal has to be before it registers.

Last, depending, eyes might be the start of a whole new feature involving organs that can get damaged from battle and repaired, and maybe bots can swivel eyes all the way back into their bodies to protect them sort of like sharks.  They'd probably tie in to reproduction somehow, like depending on how a bot splits the child might get an eye and the parent keeps an eye, and they both have to grow another eye.  But I'll need to think more about organs so that's really a whole other topic.

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