Messages

16

Newbie / Re: merry christmas!!!

« on: January 12, 2022, 01:26:13 PM »

A bit late but the sentiment is appreciated

17

Newbie / Re: Hello?

« on: December 03, 2021, 02:39:38 PM »

Welcome!

That's a common end scenario myself and others have encountered.  In theory you could avoid a mass extinction by having a very large playfield and population count.  Then there'd be some population left to repopulate after an evolutionary event that left a large die-off.  I think it's also due in part to how simple the environments are compared to real environments: there are only really two niches (plant and animal) so without the diversity of species you have some unstable setups.

Your best bet is probably to save snapshots periodically and when you hit a dead end start up a new simulation with some selected genetic strains from the last good snapshot.

18

Newbie / Re: Death Rates?

« on: July 26, 2020, 07:11:42 PM »

What version are you using?  Can you post the save here?  There might be something off with the loading code.

19

Darwinbots Program Source Code / Re: Source code license

« on: June 24, 2020, 12:01:37 PM »

Note I think it'll run under wine, though I haven't tested it myself.

20

Darwinbots Program Source Code / Re: Source code license

« on: June 23, 2020, 05:47:59 PM »

For Darwinbots2 there's a license in the install directory:

Code: [Select]

DarwinBots - copyright 2003 Carlo Comis
Modifications by Purple Youko and Numsgil - 2004, 2005
Post V2.42 modifications copyright (c) 2006, 2007 Eric Lockard  eric@sulaadventures.com
Post V2.44.01 modifications by members at http://www.darwinbots.com/Forum/
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that:
(1) source code distributions retain the above copyright notice and this paragraph in its entirety,
(2) distributions including binary code include the above copyright notice and this paragraph in its entirety in the documentation or other materials provided with the distribution, and
(3) Without the agreement of the author redistribution of this product is only allowed in non commercial terms and non profit distributions.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
I'm not sure what the name of this license is off-hand.

For Darwinbots3 it's just a normal MIT license, so it's more permissive:

Code: [Select]

Copyright (C) 2009 - 2017
Jay Lemmon Numsgil2002@yahoo.com

(
1.  Anything in the 3rd party folder is not covered by this license.
)

"MIT License"

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.

21

Darwinbots3 / Re: Trying to get darwinbots3 to build.

« on: December 30, 2019, 05:40:41 AM »

Modules look for dependencies in Bin/Release/...  You might double check that .dlls actually got put there after you ran build.py.  Likewise in Visual Studio you might try expanding the "References" of a project and see if there's any broken links.  DarwinbotsGUI has references to Azimuth there, for instance.  I can tell you is I did a fresh checkout on my machine and it worked, but it's entirely possible there's some assumption I'm making about how stuff is setup that isn't true for everyone.  I looked through the project files and didn't see any hard coded paths, for instance, but maybe there is one somewhere being sneaky.

Alternatively you might try looking at any local changes.  It's possible that VS2017 tired to do an in-place upgrade that screwed some stuff up.

...

On purpose I didn't want to have one single solution.  It may be overkill (arguably an enterprise solution) but it helps enforce separation of concerns and makes cloning one of the individual modules on another project easier (say, if I wanted to mess around in Unity with the Math library and not with the graphics library).  I've also found that a single solution tends to dramatically inflate build times, even if it only contains projects that aren't changing, as Visual Studio has to scan for which projects have changes.  I'm ideally aiming for build times of under 1 or 2 seconds to keep iteration time high.  The downside is that it's harder to do a build of everything (though build.py is supposed to make that trivial) and I often need several visual studio instances open, one for each module.

22

Darwinbots3 / Re: possible new project

« on: December 20, 2019, 11:33:04 AM »

Ah, you're basically describing a broad phase, specifically a uniform grid.  (See this lecture, for instance).  There are a couple other methods, each with pros and cons.  Personally I like sort and sweep (also called sweep and prune) just for the simplicity of implementation.  You basically project all your convex boundaries on to an arbitrary axis, sort everything, and find potential collisions by walking forward or backward from a given point.  Spatial hash could also work.  Basically a uniform grid but instead of having every cell be unique you take the x,y coordinates of non-empty cells and use it to construct a hash function in to a hash table.  Then you're only really storing cells that have stuff in them.  Worst case two cells map to the same hash cell but you still have to do a narrow phase check so it's just a few extra narrow phase checks in practice and not a big deal.

23

Darwinbots3 / Re: possible new project

« on: December 19, 2019, 05:03:16 PM »

Hey PY!  It's been a long time!

I'd chuck the old C++ version, except maybe to see how I approached some things.  For better or worse it inherits a lot of the sins of the VB6 version and I was a fairly green engineer at the time.  There's a lot I'd do differently.

For an environment grid I'd ditch object oriented entirely and do a functional style.  Essentially several flat 2D arrays of scalars with some kernels to apply to them.  I feel that's more likely to be both testable and performant.  This talk is python-centric but about doing Conway's game of life in an object oriented way and why that might not be the best way to do it.  Might give you some food for thought.

It probably just makes sense to host code on github (assuming you want to open source it) but you're welcome to any server resources you'd like.  The server is just running linux where we have (essentially) root access.

When I find free time I still try to work on DB3 but I'm happy to put together a few CLs for your project if there's anything well defined you'd like to farm out.

24

Darwinbots3 / Re: Trying to get darwinbots3 to build.

« on: October 18, 2019, 08:08:21 PM »

There aren't any up to date build instructions, but build.py should work.

The default version of visual studio it looks for is 12.0, which is Visual Studio 2013.  You can change the version by adding `--version XXX` to the arguments to build.py.  You can see the different versions of Visual Studio here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio.  It looks like 2017 is 15.0

That said, I don't know if the build script will work with newer versions of Visual Studio.

25

Bugs and fixes / Re: How are teleporters working for you?

« on: March 29, 2019, 03:05:04 AM »

Are you having a similar issue?  Like, it works at first but then stops after a while?

26

Newbie / Re: Sexual Reproduction Issue

« on: January 11, 2019, 06:14:10 AM »

Alga_Minimalis normally reproduces asexually.  Did you modify it to reproduce sexually?  I tried a similar sim years ago but that was before sexual reproduction.  I would think your bigger problem is keeping the prey from taking in predator DNA and becoming a photosynthetic predator, which would cause a lot more problems.

Either way, I don't have any off hand ideas.  We were talking about a minimum similarity measure with sexual reproduction to prevent vastly dissimilar species from sexually reproducing but I don't know if it was implemented.

I wouldn't worry too much about the cannibal predator species producing dumb babies from time to time.  The energy loss from producing a child then eating it aren't as high in Darwinbots as in the real world.

27

Off Topic / Re: Good alternatives to darwinbots

« on: November 04, 2018, 08:32:09 AM »

If you're in to the scripting aspect, there's screeps.  I haven't played it but it's relatively well reviewed.  Personally I like programming games but it always feels like I should just be doing actual programming.

If you're in to the evolution aspect, I don't know of very much new, to be honest.  My impression is that most of that creative energy is currently doing neural net stuff, since that's super en vogue right now.  So any artificial life simulations of depth are from 10+ years ago.

But I'd love to hear I'm wrong!

28

Announcements / Re: Darwinbots 2.48.31

« on: September 13, 2018, 06:44:50 AM »

Nothing at the moment.  I'm a bit stuck on the fluid model I'm using.

I had a problem with the fluid velocity becoming infinite far away from the bot.  I found this article which discusses the problem and provides a simple solution.  Now I need to find the forces the fluid puts on the bot and vice versa, which shouldn't be too hard but I've run out of steam.

29

Announcements / Re: Darwinbots 2.48.31

« on: May 02, 2018, 10:46:45 AM »

There's been very little.  (I'm still plunking away at the fluid model for Darwinbots3 but I'm at least several months away from something releasable on that front.  There's not active Darwinbots2 development going on right now, as far as I know).

30

Darwinbots3 / Re: Bot testbed

« on: November 13, 2017, 07:24:40 AM »

Yeah, that might work.  We can maybe even do pinching to reproduce still, and use the same idea of relaxing the spindle angles slowly over time.