Virus

Biological Facts

A Virus is not really a living thing. They can not reproduce by themselves. They have no metabolism. They are made up by a protein shell and in there is the DNA or RNA. They infect a cell and force the cell to produce new viruses.

DB Viruses

In DB there are also viruses. They are made up of a single gene that can be shot out and infect the bot it hits. A virus could look like, for example:

cond
start
0 .repro store
*.thisgene .mkvirus store
50 .vshoot store
stop

.thisgene tells where in the genome the gene is, .mkvirus is where you store which gene that shall be shot, and .vshoot determines how far the virus will go, the more code put there, the more it costs and more time it takes to make. This virus, if after the reproduction gene, would cause the bot to be unable to reproduce; because the virus is storing a value of zero in the .repro memory location.

1.1 Virus Creation Guide

To make a virus you should follow these steps.

• 1 Decide which of your own genes to copy into the virus or to have the viral gene replicate its own code use thisgene.

• 2 Store this in the .mkvirus command. eg This will copy the virus's gene into a temporary storage array to create the virus.

• .thisgene .mkvirus store

• 3 It takes a finite amount of time to copy this gene into the virus so at the beginning of the process, the gene length is calculated and this value is placed into a count-down timer which can be accessed by the robot via .vtimer(vtimer is the length of DNA * 2). This is a read only value indicating how long you have to wait till the virus is ready. Vtimer is 1 when there is a virus ready to fire. 0 if there is no virus ready to fire, > 1 if there is still time left to wait.

• 4 Once .vtimer reaches one, the virus is ready and it can be fired by placing any non-zero value into .vshoot. this will shoot the virus straight forward. As of last check both backshot and .aimshot work with viruses.

• 5 The virus will appear as a cyan colored shot. It can most easily be distinguished by the normally longer distance it travels.