Agents Discussion

untrustedlife wrote:

Attraction Agent seems like it could just be an aggressive forceful signalling agent, it doesn't necessarily have to just attract cells to other cells it could, say, cause the other cells to want to move away from the targeted cell. (even though the cells really don't want to)

We will use these agents later on right? , if so they should have different effects in the multicellular stage.  In fact I think the should be more generalized in the multicellular stage. Of course, we don't have to worry about that right now, but it might be a good idea to have a plan for them because agents should have effects beyond the microbe stage if a player spends so much time nurturing there agents. It would not be fun to just say, lose them.

That is the thing with the category, signaling agent is a very broad term, it will encompass so many things that it makes it hard to come up with some ideas, at least from my perspective.

And yes, the OP also stated on how these agents will scale up, but I think for right now it is focusing on the microbe stage agents.

A signaling agent is just one that targets the nucleus and changes AI.

Immortal_Dragon wrote:

untrustedlife wrote:

Attraction Agent seems like it could just be an aggressive forceful signalling agent, it doesn't necessarily have to just attract cells to other cells it could, say, cause the other cells to want to move away from the targeted cell. (even though the cells really don't want to)

We will use these agents later on right? , if so they should have different effects in the multicellular stage.  In fact I think the should be more generalized in the multicellular stage. Of course, we don't have to worry about that right now, but it might be a good idea to have a plan for them because agents should have effects beyond the microbe stage if a player spends so much time nurturing there agents. It would not be fun to just say, lose them.

That is the thing with the category, signaling agent is a very broad term, it will encompass so many things that it makes it hard to come up with some ideas, at least from my perspective.

And yes, the OP also stated on how these agents will scale up, but I think for right now it is focusing on the microbe stage agents.

The OP was mine, when I said Scale I didnt mean scaling it up in stages. You misunderstood what I said I meant scaled as in how will we upgrade them.

untrustedlife wrote:

We will use these agents later on right? , if so they should have different effects in the multicellular stage.  In fact I think the should be more generalized in the multicellular stage. Of course, we don't have to worry about that right now, but it might be a good idea to have a plan for them because agents should have effects beyond the microbe stage if a player spends so much time nurturing there agents. It would not be fun to just say, lose them.

But at the same time, we don't want agents to be too common. We wouldn't want most creatures entering the Aware stage as chemical arsenals. Biological/Chemical/Poison attacks should be unique, amongst many other approaches to survival, so I wouldn't want too many cells leaving the cell stage retaining those chemical ways, especially considering how it seems like most cells will have agents.

A balance needs to be struck, maybe the agents that transition could be the ones that are more relevant to the stages beyond the microbe stage, such as the various toxins?

Well, the agents do still exist, but instead of being excreted, they flow in the blood vessels of your multicellular organism. I think most toxins will die out just out of essence of it being too out-of-the-way to set up special poison glands. Remember however that many animals such as deer use large amounts of biological agents to attract mates and canines use agents in their urine to mark territory. So in a way they are chemical arsenals, but not in the way you would think.

Once you get up to a certain size, diffusion isn't going to spread toxins out as quickly as compared to your body size, so releasing toxins is no longer an efficient way to deal with your problems.

Scio, when getting to that size, I'm assuming it's in the multicellular and aware stages, isn't that when the various systems come in from the OE?

So let's try and wrap up all the possible effects for agents.

Agents

The components of an agent, as proposed by scio. Write each agent in this format.

Effect:
Magnitude:
Target:

Slime
Effect: Reduces movement speed.
Magnitude: Move Reduction = 1 - (1-.15)*(1.25^1-n)
n = Level
Target: All cells

Immortal_Dragon wrote:

Scio, when getting to that size, I'm assuming it's in the multicellular and aware stages, isn't that when the various systems come in from the OE?

You're correct. Once you're more than a few cells thick, you'll need a circulatory system, and from there you may get nervous, digestive, etc.

Paralytic
Effect: Decreases the efficiency of motile organelles
Magnitude: motile organelle efficiency reduction (effectively a speed reduction) = 1 - (1-.15)*(1.25^n-1)
Target: cilia, flagella, (lamellipodes?)

I want to point out that Nick chose a rather difficult one to model: slime.
Slime slows down organisms and anything else floating in the water, but doesn't target any specific organelle. For this reason, I think we should hold off on including it until we have a better idea of how fluid dynamics will be handled.

what does the magnitudes equation mean

klay2000 wrote:

what does the magnitudes equation mean

The equation specifies the efficiency of an agent by the number of times, n, it has been upgraded.

Scio, maybe we could make the slime agent act a bit differently, in that it is nothing more than a very viscous fluid. Increasing n values would increase the viscosity. This is assuming a full system of fluid physics and dynamics.

Also, did you make a typo at the end of your equation? (1.251-n) as opposed to (1.25n-1) or (1.25^n-1)

Here's another. (The names I give are placeholders. If you guys have ideas for the in-game names for these agents please tell. I think Paralytic is an example of a good name.)

Power-Dropping
Effect: Reduces processing power of compound processing organelles.
Magnitude: PP reduction = 1 - (1-.15)*(1.25^n-1)
Target: Mitochondria or Chloroplasts or Thermoplasts

That's how I would like us to do it, but wee'll have to wait and see if we can mix fluids of different viscosities.
As a matter of fact, that was a monstrous typo. Thanks for catching that.

Also, remember that all organelles are somehow processing compounds, so try to be very specific with names. I'd call that a "power dropping" compound, and restrict it to Mitochondria OR Chloroplasts OR Thermoplasts.

Okay, made the changes. How about calling it an "Organelle Depressant"?

Here is another type of agent:

Toxin
Effect: Inflicts damage to cell membranes in contact with the agent cloud until they burst.
Magnitude:
Target: Cells not in your species.

I left magnitude blank because I didn't know what to put. What would the average health of a cell be? How much damage should it do per second to a cell in contact with it?

NickTheNick wrote:

Okay, made the changes. How about calling it an "Organelle Depressant"?

How about "Enzyme inhibitor" or just "Inhibitor"

We can squabble over names later.

So I read through the microbe stage concept laid out by Nimbal on the wiki, and for the section on health I found that ATP will more or less be health. In that case, the Toxin agent cannot do damage to ATP (or at least I don't think that is possible), so instead it will do damage to the cell's membrane. Every second that a cell is in contact with a toxin cloud, it takes a percentage of damage to its membrane equal to the magnitude of the toxin agent. Reaching 100% damage would burst the membrane, spilling the contents of the cell and spelling death for that cell. If used against a player cell, it would prompt a respawn.

However, I was toying with the magnitude equation that was agreed upon some posts ago, and with using different n values I got very strange results. Remember n stands for the number of times the agent vacuole for that agent has been levelled up, or is it the level of the agent vacuole?. Either way, these were the results.



In the circle is the equation, and underlined is the equation with the input of I7 (one) for the n value. Now maybe it's just me, but I don't think its a very good idea for an agent vacuole to get worse as it levels up, to the point where the toxin actually heals the target cells.

I'll guess (without looking at the original formula) that you either wrote the formula wrong, or you are missing a parenthesis.

Okey, after looking at the original formula, it was option A. The original formula was:

Eff = l - (l-s) * a^(-n)

where the forula you put there is:

Eff = l - (l-s) * a^(n-1)

Actually, the other way you could write the formula is:

Eff = l - (l-s) * a^(1-n)

So you changed the two numbers in the last part. The right way of writing it in excel form is:

=(1-(1-0.15)*(1.25^(-l7))

Ahh, okay, thank you very much. I'm trying to get a formula for scaling the magnitude of damage the Toxin agent would do to a cell membrane. Do you have any ideas on how to scale it? I'm not really sure how much HP a cell membrane will have, so I'm working with percentages of the total health.

EDIT:

Eff = 35 - (35-15) * 2^(-n)
n	magnitude
0		15
1		19.61538
2		23.16568
3		25.89668
4		27.99744
5		29.61342
6		30.85648
7		31.81267
8		32.54821
9		33.11401
10		33.54924

 
How does this look for the scaling for the damage dealt by the Toxin agent? What the numbers in the magnitude column mean are the % of the total health of the membrane lost every second in contact with this agent.
Ex. At level 2, every second in contact with a toxin a cell's membrane would lose 23.17% of its total health.

Could adrenaline be implemented as an agent in the multicellular and aware stages? It could provide enhanced physical abilities in life or death situations.

@Nick That seems to kill them a bit fast doesn't it?

@TCC I think that sort of thing should be possible. Perhaps when your HP drops you gain a boost for a short period of time.

TheChubbyChihuahua wrote:

Could adrenaline be implemented as an agent in the multicellular and aware stages? It could provide enhanced physical abilities in life or death situations.

Agents are only a feature for the Microbe Stage and the early Multicellular Stage.

@Inca

Well in nature, fights are usually either fast or failed, and so I tried to stick with that. Also, once in contact with a Toxin cloud, chances are the cell is going to try and get out as fast as possible, and so it has to be able to damage them fast.

I guess that does make sense. The toxic cloud shouldn't be so big the player would struggle to get out of it though, because a lot of cells may be able to use toxic and we don't want everyone to be dieing all the time. From a gameplay POV it should be reasonably balenced with other methods of attack no? Or would the cost of the part that allows the toxic mean that not many cells have it?

Yeah, it won't be that large, however, all agent vacuoles cost the same, so if we were to increase the price of it for toxin agents, it would do the same for all other agents.