Difference between revisions of "Veggy"

Revision as of 17:43, 12 October 2005

Veggies

Overview

A veggie or Alga is any bot that has the autotroph box checked. This enables the bot to be fed by the program and enables it to feed off any waste it receives. If the veggie population exceeds the population limit set, the program will not allow any veggies to repopulate. Note that this often results in sharp spikes of population as all the veggies reproduce at the same time once the population falls below the threshold.

Repopulation

If a certain number of veggies die the species will be repopulated. This number is user set in the veggies options under general. The nrg of the repopulated veggies will be the same as that set for the species in the first options panel. Often repopulation is necessary to keep the bots inside alive, although cancerous veggies (veggies that always try to reproduce) have been shown to be a self sustaining energy source (just make sure you set the maximal veggy population a bit lower than you want it. This is from the aforementioned population spikes).

The repopulation cooldown period allows you to specify how long it takes until new veggies are dropped into the sim. Setting this too low is a significant source of bot overpopulation, since the faster the bots eat the new veggies the faster they get new veggies.

Veggy feeding methods

• nrg per cycle - a straight forward feeding method. Each veggy gets a set amount of energy per cycle.
• per kilobody - each veggy gets a set amount of Energy per 1000 Body points. This is useful as it discourages cancerous veggies from developing

Veg Trouble

If your vegs become monsterously fat in the first several seconds of a sim, and your cycles per second becomes too low, you're probably giving the vegs too much enrgy.

This makes the program unstable and somewhat unpredictable.

Check the simulation settings for vegs and be sure the nrg/cycle text box for vegs is set to something under about 100.