Spores and pollen should be forms of reproduction added, and sexrepro should be made easier to code.
Also, vegetables should be capable of producing fruit and seeds, to distribute them further across the map.
Meanwhile, there should be some way to make mixotrophic organisms possible, and make it so bots can evolve to become photosynthetic, mixotrophic, and so on.
Also, chemosynthesis and thermosynthesis should be added. However, this might require stuff like hydrothermal vents, and volcanism.
Multibots ARE easier to code.
Use need a -8 shoot and the .sexrepro command.
You can code a mini-bot to act as fruit and seeds by using api-genetic memory and asexual reproduction.
I meant like, actual ones in darwinbots 3. Also, I'm gonna try and make a fruiting bot with your suggestion, and maybe one that forms only when fertilized.
eh, can you clarify on that one?
As in, the ability to make the code using new code, to make it easier to do so.
Could you give a few examples on what a organel in db should do?
What should be improved with multibots?
What could be improved with multibots?
Multibots - Make them behave more like multicellular organisms, or atleast, make it possible to do so.
Organelles - Metabolize food, photosynthesize, respire, chemosynthesize, store water, thermosynthesize, produce shell, produce poison, and so on.
What should be changed/added so it would behave more like multicellular organisms?
Some multibots are incapable of reproducing on their own without pulling off parts of them. Not only that, they are the bots that break the easiest.
There have been some changes with tie mechanics in the past with DB2. Breaking/making unstable quite some multibots.
I think there were ideas for metabolism(organel kind of involved) and specialization(makes multibot more appealable ). But I've been a bit out of the loop. So, I think it's smarter letting Numsgil explain it all.
So I've heard that veggies are gonna have chloroplasts. We should allow for all organisms to have organelles. Each organelle could serve a different purpose. Multibots/multicellular organisms should be made better, and add the possibility of them evolving naturally on their own.
I'd like to add organelles, but I don't want to add them just for the sake of having them.
Chloroplasts make for interesting decisions, because as you build more and more to start generating your own energy, the increased volume, mass and intertia make it very difficult to steal energy from others. And the bigger you are, the less likely you are to be able to fend off attacks from others. This creates an interesting dynamic that's equally accessible to evolution and bot writers, and there's no single right answer. Different strategies can use different levels of chloroplasts.
By comparison, an old idea I had was to have substances in the world, each with their own given free energy level, and with random substances tagged as shell, slime, etc. This would force bots to navigate a dense web to figure out how to metabolize one substance to turn it in to another. The problem with this is that it's not necessarily an interesting problem. There's an optimal metabolic chain to build from the given substances, and while it would be interesting to see an evo sim try to evolve that optimal pathway, it's not at all an interesting thing for bot writers to play with. They'd always copy+paste the optimal solution, and the optimal solution could be found with something like Dijkstra's algorithm. So it's complicated and boring. Bleh.
I'm sort of thinking of having something like cilia for movement, where having more would let you move faster, but building more costs resources. And every time you divide you have to also divide up the cilia among the daughter cells. Likewise for various other things a bot can do. But I need to think through all the implications, and make sure it's not just extra pieces to manage for the sake of having more stuff to do. It needs to fundamentally add interesting strategic decisions to the sim. I think it will, but I want to be very deliberate about this sort of thing.
Not high on my list, but there should be some interesting things you can do with the fluid sim I'm looking to have in DB3. Periodically swirl things around a bit, like a tide, or alter the day/night pattern in different areas of the sim.
Spores and pollen should be forms of reproduction added, and sexrepro should be made easier to code. Also, vegetables should be capable of producing fruit and seeds, to distribute them further across the map.
There's no explicit spore or pollen feature, but it wouldn't be hard for a very small bot to either hibernate until an opportune moment or fertilize a large bot. In terms of smaller bots hitching a ride on a larger one, that will be possible. Bots will be able to just hard attach themselves to each other, like barnacles.
This would have to tie in with the fluid sim to be really useful, but I'm not 100% sure I know how to do diffusion in a way that's efficient. But something I'm keeping in the back of my mind.
What effect do you want salinity to have? Same with the rest. I can add arbitrary things to the sim but they're meaningless abstractions unless they do something. And as I explained above adding things for the sake of it is something I'm specifically trying to avoid.
Let's take temperature. I'd probably add temperature if I joined it with the fluid sim to produce something that would create circulation. But it doesn't seem like it'd have any meaningful gameplay interaction with bots, besides the obvious " too hot/cold for me". And even then it's not clear how that would reflect in actual effects. Would the bot have increased nrg costs if it was outside its ideal temperature range? What decides a bot's ideal temperature range? It wouldn't fundamentally change how bots interact with their world or other bots, besides encouraging them to stay in specific areas that are the right temperature, which isn't all that interesting strategically.
Salinity: Affects osmosis. Freshwater organisms hold salt, saltwater organisms excrete excess salt.
Temperature: High temperature denatures proteins and such. Can't think of much more for this, other than maybe ice formation, and some organisms incapable of regulating body heat like warmer conditions.
Also, another small idea that should be added is being able to manually give bots energy, like you can manually reproduce bots by clicking on them.
But now is this really pH anymore? I mean, we could call[ it pH, but in reality it's just an arbitrary collection of effects under the pH label. Real pH effects organisms because cells are essentially chemical. They take in chemicals, manipulate chemicals, excrete chemicals, etc. The most fundamental chemical to a cell is water, since it's usually much smaller than any other chemicals it manipulates and so permeates everything inside and outside of a cell. pH is basically the ionization of water, so pH represents a fundamental physical property of a cell's universe. Cell's even have "proton pumps" which try to change the ionization of the interior of a cell or organelle from the exterior, to create gradients to do useful work with.
Bots, on the other hand, don't exist in water. They're not chemical in nature. They don't recombine basic building blocks in to larger, more complex molecules. And their medium is essentially vacuum. pH has no meaning in the universe a bot inhabits.
In a broader sense, we could try to add substances with different concentrations, which is what I was talking about with diffusion. But again, I'm not sure it's doable in an efficient manner.