Agents Discussion

Dehidratation? All the microbe stage will be inside a water environement, composed roughly of 99% water, so i dont think any microbe will have problems with that.

Making them out of compounds and releasing the compounds back seems good to me.

However, i dont like your formula, scio. That makes upgrade level 13 be the top one, while the goal of my proposal was to not have a top upgrade level.
Edit: For the upgrades, i mean.

Daniferrito wrote:

Dehidratation? All the microbe stage will be inside a water environement, composed roughly of 99% water, so i dont think any microbe will have problems with that.

Making them out of compounds and releasing the compounds back seems good to me.

However, i dont like your formula, scio. That makes upgrade level 13 be the top one, while the goal of my proposal was to not have a top upgrade level.
Edit: For the upgrades, i mean.

Ok, I can try to rework something geometric for you.
Dehydration synthesis is the use of water to bond chemicals together.

Agree that this is getting a little off topic. I looked up dehydration synthesis, and it's the reagents which get dehydrated, so that water is one of the outputs, not inputs. I would treat signalling agents seperately to other agents, if we have them at all, but thats a discussion for later on, when we get to early multicellular perhaps?

Ok, sorry. I should have knew it, or at least searched it, but i didnt saw it. Thats probably a good sign that i should go to bed for today.

~sciocont wrote:

Daniferrito wrote:

Dehidratation? All the microbe stage will be inside a water environement, composed roughly of 99% water, so i dont think any microbe will have problems with that.

Making them out of compounds and releasing the compounds back seems good to me.

However, i dont like your formula, scio. That makes upgrade level 13 be the top one, while the goal of my proposal was to not have a top upgrade level.
Edit: For the upgrades, i mean.

Ok, I can try to rework something geometric for you.
Dehydration synthesis is the use of water to bond chemicals together.

From my understanding Dani is going for an infinite geometric series, which technically does have a limit but has an infinite number of increments, aka "Levels", which I think is a good idea.

Lol, i didnt saw that part of the post even.

Yes, my sugestion is a serie that has a limit of 100 or less, but that its infinite. It doesent need to be geometric, though, as long as it behaves the way we want, it is good. Actually, the shape i like the most would be logaritmic, but that one doesent have a finite limit.

The simplest equation would be something similair to the logistic function, which is basicaly logarithmic:

Eff = 1 - 1 / a^n

where 'n' is the upgrade step (1,2,3...) and 'a' is a tweaking parameter somewhere between 1 and 2.

a = 2 gives us the sequence on the previous page:

Spoiler:

and a = 1.1 gives us something more gradual:

Spoiler:

or in graph form, the bottom green line is for a=1.1, the top line is a=2, the others are in 0.1 increments:

Spoiler:

trying to work out an equation with a fixed starting efficiency now...

I'd take the 1.2 model there. Starts off fairly low and has a gradual gain
I believe you meant to say "Eff = 1 - (1 / a^n)"

If you figure the starting point out, I'd like to see a start at around 15-20 percent. I'll play with it and see if I can get a set start equation as well, but my money is on you.

Yup, that's what I meant, fixed it.

Literally just figured something out as you posted that, it's not as neat as the original, but it works:

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

or (same equation, but looks more similair to the previous post)

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

where 'a' and 'n' are as above, and 's' is the starting point.

The lines are the same 'a' values as above, the horizontal blue one is a=1.  Starting point s=0.2

Spoiler:

I would agree that somewhere around a = 1.2 to 1.4 looks pretty good.

EDIT:

~sciocont wrote:

...but my money is on you.

I had a bit of a head start... you may be able to make some improvement on what I came up with though, I think theres something simpler out there, but it'll do for now. I'm going to leave it at that for tonight, and get some sleep...

Nice work.
I'm actually looking at the equation with a start point of .15 (.1 seemed too low)
eff= 1 - (1-.15)*(1.25^1-n)
Which gives
1=>.15
2=>.32
3=>.456
4=>.5648
5=>.6518
6=>.7215
7=>.7772
8=>.8217
9=>.8574
10=>.8859
11=>.9087
Which I think is very nice.

That looks quite good. A slight note, through:

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

Where:
l - Limit. The point it ends at, in case we decide to lower that value.
s - Starting point. What f[1] is.
a - How fast does it grow. Higher values make it grow faster

I just added the limit.
The values sugested by scio (and i agree) are:
l - Either 1 or 100, depending if we express the percentage over 1 or over 100%
s - .15
a - 1.25

Finally:

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

Thats just the exact same function "shifted" one node to the left. That would make f[0] = s, how eficient it is when it has no upgrades yet. But thats just tecnicalism.

Ok, our efficiency woes have been answered. What else needs to be completed?

Now we need to come up with a list of possible effects an agent can have. I think you listed some on the first page.

Slime: Reduces movement speed
Agent destroying enzyme/Anti-Agent: Eliminates other agents

Here are some others that I remember earlier mentioned but yet to be listed on this thread:

Organelle Contaminant: Reduces processing power or efficiency of targeted organelles.
Signalling Agents: Sends a message to target cells (Repel cells, warn cells, etc.)

This list is very bare, I will need some help remembering what was discussed.

I think the discussion veered towards discussing the efficiency of the agents and the vacuoles rather than a list of possible effects. I do have two ideas

• Calcifying/Petrifying Agent: Cells can’t move at all on their own, will still drift (disables movement organelles like flagella and cilia)
• Anti-Membrane Agent: Attacks the membranes of other cells, constant damage until it bursts, releasing the compounds held within.

Immortal_Dragon wrote:

• Calcifying/Petrifying Agent: Cells can’t move at all on their own, will still drift (disables movement organelles like flagella and cilia)

Isn't that just an organelle contaminant with 100% processing power reduction?

Yeah, that sounded redundant even in my head. :lol: 

Actually, that reminds me that I did have the idea of introducing a carbonate-excreting organelle that would use CO₂ to make limestone, which could be placed in the environment, or could create a protective shell.
This could be really interesting and have awesome potential for communal predators, who could create a sort of horseshoe shape which other microbes would swim into and then not know how to get out of. The predators would simply stay inside and pick them off.
I actually have a list I'm making of target gameplay scenarios and relationships.

Here is the list I have so far compiled on a Word document

The List:

The orange color are new ones I have come up with, and the red is from scio, if the carbonate would be an agent produced by the cell.

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.

~sciocont wrote:

Actually, that reminds me that I did have the idea of introducing a carbonate-excreting organelle that would use CO₂ to make limestone, which could be placed in the environment, or could create a protective shell.
This could be really interesting and have awesome potential for communal predators, who could create a sort of horseshoe shape which other microbes would swim into and then not know how to get out of. The predators would simply stay inside and pick them off.
I actually have a list I'm making of target gameplay scenarios and relationships.

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.

Would it then be realistic or not to be able of creating limestone also in the other phases/stages like aware and society etc.?
It doesn't seems to unrealistic after lookin on the wikipedia page about limestone.
If yes, you could then be able to create (using CaCO₃/CO₂) limesatone for building also in the society stages right?

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?