Darwinbots Forum
Welcome To Darwinbots => Newbie => Topic started by: Testlund on October 17, 2005, 07:58:05 PM
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I whould like to know what values whould be the most realistic to put in the fields on the Advanced Costs tab. It whould have been nice with a help pop-up for these fields. :wacko:
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I have no idea actually!
Alot of them have been 0 in the past, since they had no fields to put anything into.
Store commands and conditions are the exception to this, and the advanced costs tab will automatically load whatever values for these a sim had (say pre-2.4)
If that last sentence doesn't make any sense, it's because I just woke up, so bear with me.
Advanced commands should probably be more than basic commands, which should proably be more than bit commands. Other than that, feel free to just make up random values and see what happens. ;)
Welcome to Darwinbots. :sly:
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Hi and wlecome to DB.
Stuff in these settings panels has largely just been left where it was. most of the value s are zero but there really aren't any recommended values to put in there.
Like Num said, just play with it and see what works for you.
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Ok, thanks. I guess you know I'm talking about the latest version 2.4. I was just thinking that if I left all fields with 0's then the bots whouldn't have any metabolism or energy transfers at all, acting like frozen in time kind of state. I want it to be as close to realism as possible. Anyway, I haven't had much opportunity to try out this program's full potential as I keep getting runtime errors and crashes. I tried out the Darwin 2.37.4 version since last night. I start up a simulation, go away for a couple of hours, come back to find the program crashed, either frozen, runtime error or overflow. Graa! :angry: I guess I wont see any bots develop anytime soon, huh?
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Same old problem we all get I'm afraid. That's the main reason that I still primarily use 2.36.7. I find it more stable than the other recent releases. It is identical to 2.37.4 in most ways.
2.4 is very much an Alpha test version that still needs a LOT of work to bring everything up to scratch.
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I found most of my problems when switching back and forth from
2.4 to 2.37 or 2.36 resulted by not using the correct sysvars2.21
they ARE different!
so for now I keep copies stashed for each version ...
have been using 2.37 mostly ...
but haven't done any long-term runs.
~griz~
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Same old problem we all get I'm afraid. That's the main reason that I still primarily use 2.36.7. I find it more stable than the other recent releases. It is identical to 2.37.4 in most ways.
2.4 is very much an Alpha test version that still needs a LOT of work to bring everything up to scratch.
Ok. I think I'll give the 2.36.7 version a try instead. Have been trying out the 2.4 Alpha version this afternoon. I'm going to post in the 'Bug report' section about the problems I've found in the 2.4 version.
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Ok. I think I'll give the 2.36.7 version a try instead. Have been trying out the 2.4 Alpha version this afternoon. I'm going to post in the 'Bug report' section about the problems I've found in the 2.4 version.
Cool. We need all the bug reports we can get. Poor old Num is swamped enough already. :D
That's what you get for being ambitious enough to create a whole new game Num :)
Seriously though. We appreciate the time you are taking to find the bugs and it will help a lot.
2.36.7 is still not toatally bug free. There are things that will screw it up still. After a while you kind of learn what kills it and avoid those things. May not be the ideal answer but right now it's all we have. I guess the other choice would be to put all of the programming resources onto bug fixing and none to development. But when the vast majority of our resources consists of Num (an overworked Math major) and me (an overworked and underpaid research chemist/database programmer), it's not really surprizing.
Ah well, That's life I guess. :D
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Are you sure you mean 2.36.7? The latest 2.36 release I could find on the ftp was 2.36.5. That one also says Stable. Tried that out and the program just keeps freezing, two times when I ran in fast mode. Then I ran in normal speed, went to shopping, came back and the program had slowed down to a crawl, then it stopped, showing 1 cycle/sec speed. Also there were lots of bots and veggies on screen, but the 'Total bots' amount said 4, I think.
I think also that it's a good idea if you just work with fixing the bugs for awhile. I think the program is advanced enough as it is. The nest generation from here whould be to make the cells be able to develop into complex critters like worms or shrimps. Then you could call yourselves Gods of Cyberlife. :lol:
PS: If someone has find what settings seems to make the program most stable I whould like to hear about it. In the mean time I will try and see for myself.
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Alot of it comes back to the Visual Basic virtual machine I think. It behaves differently on different computers, which drives me absolutely crazy.
Be sure you have the right settings files for your version. I've noticed that the program behaves really weird if the veggies get too much nrg every cycle.
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Are you sure you mean 2.36.7? The latest 2.36 release I could find on the ftp was 2.36.5. That one also says Stable.
You are right. I just checked and V2.36.7 isn't up on the Darwinbots.com FTP
However you can get it at The Old FTP Site (http://utenti.lycos.it/darwinbots/). Downloads are a little slower there but not too bad.
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Alot of it comes back to the Visual Basic virtual machine I think. It behaves differently on different computers, which drives me absolutely crazy.
Be sure you have the right settings files for your version. I've noticed that the program behaves really weird if the veggies get too much nrg every cycle.
I think I know what you mean with too much NRG per cycle for the veggies. Looks like setting the 'Population Control' level on the 'General' tab from 50000 to 5000 makes the program stable. So far so good. But that sounds awful lot of energy. I don't know how cells work, but whouldn't something between 1 - 20 per cycle be more realistic? How fast does cells in the real world pick up energy/sec anyway? :P
What puzzles me right now is that the 'Decay Rate' on the 'Corpse Mode' doesn't seem to work. Also I found some veggies and bots get frozen in "mid air" when I'm playing in 'Pond mode'.
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What puzzles me right now is that the 'Decay Rate' on the 'Corpse Mode' doesn't seem to work. Also I found some veggies and bots get frozen in "mid air" when I'm playing in 'Pond mode'.
Decay rate worked last time I tried it. (which hasn't been for some time now admitedly).
Bots have always become frozen in mid air from time to time even when they are set to be bouyant or heavy. I never did get right to the bottom of this.
One thig that does happen quite regularly though is that somehow a bot's ".fixed" value gets set to non-zero. This can happen with older bots as "Altzheimer's" sets in and make random changes to memory locations.
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For handy unfixing code you can use this:
.fixpos *.fixed mult decProviding it's just a waste effect, the bots should unfix themselves. I pretty much use this as a standard feature in my bots. Fixing is a fairly useful behavior for plants in gravity modes, so what you're seeing might also be considered evolution.
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nrg per cycle should be set to like 10.
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I've just added a little popup that alerts the user if the nrg/cycle is set unrealistically high. Should help new users with this sort of problem.
I'll post 2.4.1 later today with tthe few bug fixes I've done since 2.4.0.
Also, I'll post an animal minimalis that works better in 2.4 (forces used scaled by mass).