Self-Replicating Bugs

[MrD3xter]

Hey, I had an idea a while ago to make an e2 of a small burrow and a 0.1 scale antlion modeled hologram. The chip would find the closest prop, send the mini antlion to it, and propcore would delete the prop. The antlion would then return and the burrow would get a little bigger. As the burrow gets bigger, more antlions would be produced to collect materials. Soon after beginning, however, I discovered that this would require much more that e2 was capable of, or at least more than what I could do with it. Anyhow the problems I faced were mainly getting holograms to move slowly towards something, and adding animations to holograms(such as the antlion walking animation).

So I ask you, should I continue this project on e2 with help? Or try to learn lua and start from there?

Any help would be much appreciated.

[Hitman271]

Lua is always better for this because the only limit is gmod itself

[Techni]

use arrays to make it object based.

[Riddler]

From doing similar things I can tell you a few things that might help.

1. Treat each 'bug' as an entry in a table(s), for example a table for pos, direction. Every tick add direction to pos and iterate through to effect them. Theres probably better ways of handleing it but this worked best for me.

2. As you say theres a limit to what the E2 can do. I'n my expereance when it comes to very large ammounts of 'bugs' the limit becomes the maths etc used to decide what each bug is doing, moving to, etc, etc, etc eventually hits the tick quota. As a way arround if you stick a CPU in the middle to do the calculations all you do is feed it any needed data it can't gather/track itself then get it to feed the E2 new positions for the bugs etc. This setup takes a fair bit of toying with but works extremly well and allows colonies of extreme sizes. Ofcourse this would require learning assembly.

[Nikita]

It's your choice really, E2 can do what you described if you download propcore and holoModelAny extensions, however E2 is still significantly slower than Lua, and when you do know Lua, it's easier due to the universal nature of Lua arrays.

Lua makes you free, but getting people to download your scripts is a little more challenging than spawning an E2 on a wire server.

[d3cr1pt0r]

Lua makes you free, but getting people to download your scripts is a little more challenging than spawning an E2 on a wire server.

That

[MrD3xter]

Thanks for the input. I think I'll probably use lua, because in my opinion I don't want this on servers, it could be quite minge-like for someone to spawn an e2 or an entity and have these bugs run around and destroy everything in their paths. My only problem is learning lua, though from what I've heard it's quite easy. It would be nice to find a tutorial (the ones on the gmod wiki didn't help me much), but I think I can make do with this.

[Muffin Burglar]

Thanks for the input. I think I'll probably use lua, because in my opinion I don't want this on servers, it could be quite minge-like for someone to spawn an e2 or an entity and have these bugs run around and destroy everything in their paths. My only problem is learning lua, though from what I've heard it's quite easy. It would be nice to find a tutorial (the ones on the gmod wiki didn't help me much), but I think I can make do with this.

I don't see how it'd be mingy, you're not allowed to delete entities that aren't owned by you with propcore.
Nice idea, by the way ^_^

[bugyspam]

RepAI (Rev.23) Download! there you go and http://replicatorai.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Replicator AI is the svn.

[MrD3xter]

Aww, it's already been made. Oh well hopefully I'll think of something else, possibly easier or using e2 since I already know a lot of it. And thanks for the info about propcore, I didn't know it was restricted by prop protection.

--EDIT--
Never mind, they do go and collect props, but they don't do anything with what they've gathered. Work will "continue"!