Messages

16

Newbie / question about costs / evo

« on: July 27, 2008, 07:12:21 PM »

I've been having some difficulties in my evo sims in recent versions, specifically the bots expend very little energy doing anything, and absorb energy from feeding at a furious rate.
 
This leads to a situation where there's no evolutionary pressure.
 
In old versions of darwinbots, you could control the costs of movement, of executing a condition, and etc - unfortunately, when I try to bring up the "set costs" menu, darwinbots crashes with a "you need msstdfmt.dll on this machine."
 
I tried downloading it and placing it in the darwinbots directory, and in windows/system32, to no effect.
 
Is there some way to manually configure the costs? Or rather, what lines in the settings file contain those variables?
 
I'd really like to be able to make the cost/consuption ratio more balanced - bots speeding around with little to no expenditure just isn't conducive to evo, and playing with friction and viscosity just isn't balancing it out enough.

17

Bug reports / few random bugs

« on: March 30, 2006, 06:02:39 PM »

Youko: Sorry, it's the 2.41 exe I'm running.
 
numsgil: Sounds like everything is under control - I'm glad.
 
The only other bugs I've noticed so far is the tendancy for certain variables to become unchecked or revert to defaults on a reload, such as light filtering, fluid dynamics, and etc. But I got the impression from a different thread that these are all identified issues.

18

Bug reports / few random bugs

« on: March 30, 2006, 03:36:37 AM »

First, I want to say awesome work, dudes. You've brought this thing a long way in the last couple years.
 
I've noticed a few minor things so far.
 
Running a pondmode sim with veggies set to kilobody point mode, slightly higher than usual gravity, low viscosity.
 
1. Veggies which are checked as "blocked" periodically become unblocked and drift to the bottom. Usually big ones, though I'm not sure if that's supposed to make a difference.
 
2. With top/bottom wrap off, some veggies and corpses manage to pass through the bottom of the field into a limbo area beneath.
 
3. Since veggies can occupy the same coordinates as one another, using the "planet eaters" function with unblocked veggies will cause the veggies to form into a superattractive clump which, like a black hole, sucks in every veggie in the field once it gets dense enough. This happens even with low settings for the "planet eaters" field [0.2, for example], and a side effect is that a "black hole" of veggies stops falling through the field and becomes "stuck in place".
 
I think that part of the problem is that veggies are permeable - if they were able to bounce off one another it wouldn't be possible for enough of them to cooccupy the same space in order to create a "black hole".
 
I wonder if problem #2 might be related as well.

19

DNA - General / some minor help

« on: April 16, 2005, 10:48:10 PM »

It would be a lot simpler if there was like a "north" or something for bots to refer to, imo.
 
As for *velscaler yeah, that's what I mean, although my plan has been to have some kind of counter whereby the bot enacts different behaviors based on its mean velocity. Like accelerate up - spin until slow - move towards target if seen - if nothing than + or - 45 degrees from initial heading then accelerate up again, etc.
 
Like the bot always scans for targets before moving after going too slow. That's the basis of the "movmenet" part of my bot [and bear with a programming newbie], entirely seperate from the targeting or chasing part.
 
Since I want this bot to go through my evo sim, I'm also worried about seperating the "daemons" coz I don't want critical bits to be lost.
 
BTW, my previous evo'd sim uses its own weird memory locations that I can't quite figure out how they work, so don't expect my bot to be anything special.

20

Off Topic / I am an artist, pt 2

« on: April 16, 2005, 09:50:09 PM »

If you can turn it into a doom marine and make it look good in doom2 resolutions I will buy you a beer - I mean I will literally fly or take a bus to your home and drag you off to a bar.

21

DNA - General / some minor help

« on: April 16, 2005, 09:41:26 PM »

I'm not thinking as far as energy cosumption. I just want a common-sense benchmark. Is there a way for the bot to get it's absolute position, or at least some kind of orienting point?
 
But that's too complex for this bot. I think I just need to test a bot with various values until it appears to move as I would like it to. I mean as long as it is speeding up and slowing down properly the dx and sx should suffice.

22

Newbie / Newbie

« on: April 16, 2005, 09:34:39 PM »

I'm trying my hand at writing a simple bot, but that's because the bot code is kind of simple. As for any real programming, I stopped in 89 at qbasic. :)
 
BTW, for a fps bot to work like this it would have to be constantly shooting, which might work but would seriously bog down the game. But who cares. I'm hooked on DB.

23

Newbie / Newbie

« on: April 16, 2005, 01:55:48 PM »

Work? It was fun! :0
 
Letting a sim run on auto doesn't cause the bots to evolve sensible behaviors - they just learn to feed mindlessly. You have to monitor it to make the results count.
 
Besides, I had the friction cranked and I needed the veggies to be equidistant so that the bots would either develop a sensible movement strategy or else die.

24

DNA - General / some minor help

« on: April 16, 2005, 01:25:34 PM »

I'm working on a movement script that makes the bot accelerate when it's going too slow and let itself drift once it gets going too fast - when its drifting it rotates 360 degrees once in awhile to scan for targets.
 
My question is what are the values for movement, I.e., how fast is 1, how fast is 2, etc.

25

Newbie / Newbie

« on: April 16, 2005, 01:17:41 PM »

Yes, but even tweaking the repopulate function causes the veggies to tend to clump.
 
For my purpose, I was adding veggies manually specifically where they were furthest away from the nearest clumps of veggies, so that the field was always covered with scattered clumps that were roughly equadistant from each other.
 
Basically the only way to do a forced evo sim like this is to be there at all times while the sim is running so that you can monitor and alter conditions on the fly. That's why I spend literally 13 or more hours over a two day period monitoring the sim.
 
Of course, since the C_Anscestralis bot is so simple to begin with, the bots never really evolved much beyond a better movement and reproductive strategy.

26

Newbie / Newbie

« on: April 16, 2005, 02:23:46 AM »

The problem with that is the veggies tend to clump - for a boom and bust you need to populate the veggies everywhere and keep doing it until the screen is totally filled with bots. You don't want a big clump but rather a scattered bunch of small clumps so the bots have to keep roving aroud.
 
The result of my evo is a hardy bot that can take root under a variety of circumstances, but can't compete with a specialized bot, as you said. But that's okay - that was as far as my thinking had gone.
 
That bot will simply be food for the one I'm writing now :)

27

Newbie / Newbie

« on: April 15, 2005, 04:35:36 PM »

To the best of my awareness it's not possible to run an extended sim without supervision, since it will either crash or the bots will extinct - and its not particularily useful for forced evolution.
 
I used boom-and-bust feeding cycles, followed by periods of "feeding trough" competition, followed by more boom-and-bust cycles. At times I would use drifting veggies, at times blocked ones. At times I would significantly increase the friction variable.
 
And every now and then I would throw in a competitor species, usually I_Flamma since its the most deadly stock bot. At first the I_Flammas would rapidly take over, but after awhile the bots developed strategies.
 
I began with C_Anscestralis, but the present bot code is entirely different. As I said, mostly junk, but some of it must be doing something.
 
Anyway, the bot I'm writing now will be somewhat more sophisticated, but I'll run it thorugh the same evolutionary difficulties and see where it ends up.
 
I'm a member of the zdaemon gaming community - zdaemon is a win32 doom port. The bots are quite stupid, and I was hoping that I could port some of the DB bot DNA into the zcajun bot code.
 
BTW, I did download some of the present top bots. Destinatus_Preliator utterly stomps my bots unless outnumered 80 to 1. But that's what you get pitting a dumb but evo'd bot against a monster like that.

28

Newbie / Newbie

« on: April 15, 2005, 04:08:57 PM »

Ah, I didn't see that file, thanks.
 
My evolved bots will defeat all of the stock bots, even slightly outnumbered - except for the stock I_Flamma, with which they will develop equalibrium - so long as there are enough veggies - I haven't tried f1 settings, but I was using an earlier version at first.
 
Most of the DNA appears to be junk, but their general movement and behavior has grown visibly more sophisticated as time goes on. However they were quite simple at the start.
 
Now that I have upgraded to 2.36 I am going to write a bot from scratch.

29

Newbie / Newbie

« on: April 15, 2005, 03:39:56 AM »

Hello.

I discovered DB a few days ago at HotU, and I've spent most of the last two days evolving a strain of bots through natural selection. Basically keep hand-populating veggies all over until a few generations have gone by with huge populations, then let it stabilize into a small population feeding at a small cluster of veggies, then repeat. Then repeat with un-blocked veggies a few times. Then back to blocked veggies.

Every so often I would let the veggie population dwindle until only the hardiest five variants of my bot were left, then start the whole process over again with all five of those competing at the start.

After a few days of this, my bot's code doubled. The intense competition seems to have worked for it.
 
Anyway, I just started learning the bot code, and it looks like most of mines' is junk.
 
My question is simple. The help files say that the sysvars utlilize memory cells, but it doesn't say which ones. I am assuming that if I use one of them by mistake it will throw everything off.
 
Thanks!