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Messages - Clickbeetle
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981
« on: May 29, 2011, 08:13:30 PM »
Hmm, no major upsets so far. Except Guardian Angels beating 4Head 3-0; I don't get how that happened.
982
« on: May 29, 2011, 08:03:50 PM »
(minus killer bots like Drumblebee and stuff to make it fair)
Aww.  But 2600 bots!?!! You sure you're up for that? Let's say you average 1 minute 30 seconds per match. With 2600 bots that's 3900 minutes of fight time, or 65 hours. And that's just round 1. If the number of bots remaining is halved every round, we can double that figure to 130 hours for the whole tournament. Factor in loading times, importing and exporting bots, keeping track of fight records, and we can conservatively double that figure again (probably more than double but we're being conservative here) to 260 hours. It's a really cool idea but just be sure you know what you're getting into here...
983
« on: May 29, 2011, 07:42:33 PM »
I used to prefer DSL because there were no utterly dominant designs; you could experiment and make unique bots that were still good. Now in the age of popups and razor flails, I think I prefer stock.
So now rather than try and build in DSL2, I'm putting that time into working on DSL3 and making it better.
984
« on: May 29, 2011, 06:52:01 PM »
The cake is amazing. I just don't understand how it doesn't die with such a big exposed chassis. Unreal!
Well a bigger chassis has more HP, and I'm guessing that thing has 10mm titanium or something.
But still... I agree it's unreal. In round 3, it didn't even lose any Hypno teeth until the last 10 seconds!
The only bot I see being able to easily KO the Cake is Lapshade of Doom. If NFX doesn't make it out of the loser's bracket I think Craaig has a very real shot at the championship.
985
« on: May 29, 2011, 05:47:29 PM »
LOL Cube Plough won a match. Seems to actually be threatening to tall bots.
I was impressed with Xception; I didn't expect those saws to do so much damage.
986
« on: May 23, 2011, 12:33:06 AM »
This is a short story I wrote for my Insect Behavior class a few years ago. Looking back on it, I can see several areas where it could be improved... but I still think it is my best finished piece of writing. (Hopefully that will change once I finish some other things I'm working on.)
Italics formatting is removed from copy/pasting into here, but oh well.
What Might Have Happened: A Story About Click Beetles and Their Behavior
This is the story of two click beetles who met in a stand of spruce one day, and were preparing to mate when one of them was suddenly and tragically killed. The other beetle escaped by using its renowned jumping ability. There was no dialogue between the two beetles and neither of them felt any true emotions, as for the most part they were following preset instincts and fixed action patterns. The beetle that escaped lived on to find another mate and led what might be called a successful life. The end.
These kinds of things happen every day, and a detailed, accurate account of this quite common occurrence would be rather dull reading. The male beetle waved his antennae up and down. The sensilla on the top and bottom of the antennae were picking up pheromone molecules. Some instinct told him to start walking, so he did. The instincts must be obeyed. Then the instinct told him to start zigzagging, so he did that. And so on; you get the picture.
This, then, is what might have happened, had the beetles possessed somewhat more intelligence and feelings.
Elanor Tara Davenport, or Ela as she liked to be called, clung with all six of her legs to a narrow blade of grass growing under a large grove of spruce trees. She was a click beetle, of the genus Agriotes to be specific, a rather unremarkable brown individual with a few thin hairs on her head and thorax, antennae about as long as her legs and segmented like beads on a string, and several barely distinguishable lines running along her elytra. She was also newly emerged from her pupal stage, after having lived underground as a wireworm feeding on roots for twenty-five molts over a period of years.1 She would have very much liked to remain a larva for a while longer, but her Mother didn’t appreciate Ela staying underground for so long.
“You’re a growing female, Ela,” Mother Nature had said to her at her twenty-fifth molting. “You can’t stay a wireworm forever. Quite frankly, I think it would be embarrassing for you to still be living in the soil at your age. It’s about time you became a responsible adult and got out into the world. Forage for food, find a mate, oviposit, pass on your genetic material.”
So Ela had finally and reluctantly pupated, and just recently had become a responsible adult, just as her Mother Nature wanted. Now, perched head-up on the blade of grass, she was learning the ins and outs of what being responsible entitled.
A tingling sensation near the tip of her abdomen drew her attention. Something inside her wanted to be released. It’s my exocrine glands, she guessed. It’s time to release pheromones to attract a mate already? Oh, frass! I don’t know at all what I’m doing. What am I supposed to do when somebody comes? What if I don’t like the guy? What if he doesn’t like me?
Ela worried and fretted over this until the conflicting mental signals of pheromone release and caution resulted in grooming behavior. She seemed to be doing a lot of grooming lately. So much, in fact, that she would bet the strangely attractive, greenish paper she found on the ground once that she was the cleanest click beetle in the forest. After starting to groom her perfectly spotless left antenna for the second time, she suddenly realized she would need someone else to take the bet, and decided to release her pheromones.
Involuntarily, the hemolymph pressure in her abdomen increased slightly, and tiny wisps of volatile chemicals, detectable only to another click beetle of her species, began diffusing out. Ela just hoped the chemicals weren’t conveying some embarrassing message like, “Hi, my name is Ela Tara D., and I’m anxious to mate with any random guy who happens to be passing through.”
~
Meanwhile, flying over an open field adjacent to the spruce forest, wings rhythmically beating the air in figure-eights, was another click beetle named Cole Leopold Terry. It was swarming time for the Agriotes males looking for mates, of which Cole was a part. He had already found several mates, however, and the other males were starting to get jealous and roughhousing him because of it. So he flew some distance away from the area everyone else was searching, hoping to find a lone female in need of company.
He wasn’t expecting to find one very quickly, so it came as a shock when his antennae picked up the intoxicating scent of a female sex pheromone. The few particles he smelled burned through his antennae like fire and set his brain alight, and then the effect was gone, leaving an empty, primal hunger for more. The aroma was so powerful, in fact, that it caused him to drop rather ungracefully to the ground. When Cole finally recovered his bearings, he found himself lying on his back.
He knew he was upside-down because all of his legs were contacting nothing but air. Lacking the ground for sensory feedback, he started waving his legs about in a very uncoordinated fashion, searching for any sort of contact on his dorsal side. He kept up his fruitless search for ground contact for maybe fifteen seconds before giving up.2 “Frass!” he cursed. He would need to perform a jump if he was going to find that lovely female.
Cole knew from experience that a jump wasn’t something you did unless you had to, or unless you were one of those “extreme” types with a death wish who did stuff like poke sleeping frogs and fly through the holes in spider webs. The process of jumping was like having your brains shoved down your crop while you spun like one of those demented whirligig beetles.c Clicking was an activity best avoided, but sometimes, like now, there was no other choice.
He started by retracting his appendages and head. This loosened up a pivot point in his thorax, and he arched his body so that only his pronotum and elytral tips remained in contact with the ground. As he did this, he felt a small peg on his prosternum slide smoothly out of a pit on his mesosternum. Another retraction of his head briefly opened the sutures on his prosternum, causing a slight depression, and he felt the peg slip a little ways over the lip of his mesosternum, where it caught and held its position with a rough, ridged spot on the tip. The cuticle of his mesosternum was stretched taut, tension was rapidly building up in his prothoracic muscles, and within half a second he was ready to jump.4
Before actually clicking, Cole lay on his back for a while, mentally preparing himself for the debacle.e He really did loathe having to click. Well, there’s nothing for just laying here. That female isn’t going to come to me. He just hoped he would land on his legs on the first jump, so he wouldn’t need to do it again.
He relaxed his muscles, his head shifted forward, and he felt the peg slip over the mesosternal lip. All the tension that had been building up until now was released, sending the peg back into the mesosternum and rapidly jack-knifing his body so it arched the other way. He felt the bumper on his prosternal peg slam into the buffer on his mesosternum, producing a sickening snap. The base of his elytra struck the ground, and suddenly his brains were in his hindgut. The ground was spinning over and under his eyes, his head was vibrating from the recoil, and his legs flailed helplessly in the wind as he bounced up to a height he would be much more comfortable flying at.f
Then, with a thud, it was over. He found his legs once again in contact with solid earth that was no longer spinning. After a moment of sorting out his senses, Cole remembered why it was he had needed to click, and set off to try and catch another whiff of that pheromone.
He found one near the stand of spruce bordering the clearing. It was stronger here, burning through his whole nervous system, and it seemed to carry a message implied in it, one he had not noticed before.
“Hi, my name is Ela Tara D., and I’m anxious to mate with any random guy who happens to be passing through.”
Cole’s antennae waved furiously. His legs scrabbled on the dirt in an uncoordinated attempt to accelerate. His wings twitched in his elytra. He would have whinnied if he could. He was so excited, he concluded he must be in love for real. Not like the other mates he had found. This beetle would be his one true mate for life, and they would live a happy, peaceful life and die together in their sleep. Love would conquer any obstacles between him and this female.
In most circumstances, higher vertebrates are far more intelligent than insects, but in this respect Cole was at least as smart as the average human being.
Which is to say, completely brainless.
Nevertheless, Cole kept walking toward the spruce, vibrating his antennae diagonally up and down as he did7, driven on by the intoxicating pheromone.
~
Ela was surprised when she saw a male beetle coming so soon after she released her pheromones. So surprised, in fact, that she dropped off her blade of grass, fortunately landing on her tarsi, and scurried behind a nearby plant. The other beetle approached the blade where she had been, calling out her name.
“Hello, Ela Tara D.!” the beetle shouted from the base of the grass. “I’m Cole Leopold Terry, and I’m in love with you!”
Cole probed the base of the grass with his antennae and started climbing it. His movements were rushed and unconsidered, and he sounded like a sugar-filled third-instar wireworm on the night before Christmas. “No you’re not,” Ela corrected him. “You’re just following a set of fixed action patterns.”
“No, I really do love you!” Cole said to a bead of water on the grass. “Your cuticle is the most perfect shade of brown, like the soils of my larvahood. Your ommatidia are like deep pools of twilight. Your labium is so exquisitely formed–”
“If you were motivated by more than just fixed action patterns, you would know that there’s nothing on that blade of grass except a few beads of water, dumb-abdomen,” Ela interrupted.
Cole rotated his entire body, looking in every direction until he finally fixated on Ela hiding behind another blade. “I knew that,” he said. “I was just... um... blushing. Yeah. And I didn’t want you to see.”
“Beetles don’t blush and you know it,” Ela retorted. “Not even freakish anthropomorphic beetles.”
“Well, maybe,” Cole admitted. “But I still love you.”
He dropped off the blade of grass and landed flat on his back. “Oh, caterpillar frass!” he cursed loudly. He flailed his legs about, searching for ground contact and finding none. “Can you come over... wait, no don’t. Watch this. I’m going to click higher than you’ve ever seen before, and I’m going to do more somersaults than you can count and still land on my tarsi.”
Ela would have rolled her eyes if she could. Cole was already arching his thorax above the ground to set the click mechanism. Then he held it there, head and appendages tucked in, apparently thinking he could build up more tension by staying like that. The stress on his muscles must have been enormous.h
A minute of silence followed. A very awkward minute, as Cole lay on his back like someone doing yoga and Ela watched curiously from behind her grass. Then, suddenly and with a loud click, Cole catapulted into the air. He went almost 30 centimeters, head and prothorax bouncing on his mesothorax, and his whole body flipping end over end the whole way. Then he came back down again, landed on his head, bounced, and came to rest on his tarsi. “Impressed?” he asked with a flourish of his antennae.
Ela was impressed, although she wasn’t about to admit it. She wasn’t about to admit that, in a flash of intelligence on par with that of a human, she had decided she might like this guy after all. Maybe they could find a nice patch of loamy soil somewhere and overwinter together, maybe raise a small family of 130 the next spring...
All these thoughts vanished, however, as she saw the most horrible monster imaginable come crashing through the grass to her left. It had to be a hundred times bigger than either Ela or Cole. Its grotesque mound of soft, fat flesh rippled under its coarse, wart-riddled skin in a midgut-wrenching way. Its eyes gleamed with a predatory hunger as its malicious gaze fell on the two beetles before it. It was a toad, the dark creature mentioned only in whispered stories by the wireworms in the soil, who were oft promptly shushed by Mother Nature.
In an event that took only seconds, but seemed to last hours, a black, gaping maw opened in the toad’s nightmarish face, and an impossibly long pink tentacle shot out with impossible speed. It caught Cole, and brought him struggling back into the toad’s maw with equally impossible speed. Ela, frightened out of her wits, switched into instinct mode. She retracted her head and legs and arched her body so the peg on her prosternum slid out of the pit on her mesosternum. She set the peg on the edge of the mesosternum, built up tension in her prothoracic muscles, and wasted no time in releasing it as soon as it was ready.9
The click she had heard from Cole sounded quite different when she was doing it. It sounded like her cuticle was snapping. She launched into the air, spinning and flexing uncontrollably, unable to pick out anything from her jumbled senses. The image of Cole being snared by the pink tentacle flashed across her thoughts. Would he be all right?
Suddenly, her abdomen struck the ground, and she bounced off into the grass and came to rest on her back. The toad was sitting a little further away than it had been, looking a bit startled, with one of Cole’s elytra hanging out of its mouth in a macabre fashion. Ela would have screamed at the beast in rage, but there was no way for her to communicate with it. So she clicked again, partly to escape from the toad, partly to scramble her brains and forget the appalling image of Cole’s elytron.
Ela landed on her tarsi this time, and scurried into the tall grass in a fit. Behind her, she heard the toad go crashing through in the opposite direction. “I hope you get run over by a car!” she cried after it, knowing that it wouldn’t hear her.
She sulked for a long time after that. There was a tingling in her abdomen, but she had no desire to release any pheromones.
“Oh, get over it already,” Mother Nature told her. “It was just one male, and he would have left you as soon as you mated. Now, there are plenty more fish in the sea. Forget Cole and go find another mate!”
Ela had long ago gotten used to her Mother popping up when and where she was least expected. “Actually, the humans are overfishing the sea quite severely–”
“I know what the humans are doing!” Mother Nature snapped. “Terrible, awful things. Worse than that toad just did. And they’ll pay for it, don’t worry. But that’s not the point. The point is, that your point is to pass on your genes. Not start some bloody touching romance. This is nature, red in tooth and claw! You need to be tough; be strong, or you won’t survive. Move on and find more mates.”
Ela reluctantly took her Mother’s advice and found that she was right. The next male she found mated and then left, as did all the others. She overwintered and laid several eggs in the spring, but knowing she would never see them hatch and that the majority would die in larvahood, she derived no satisfaction from it. Some, like her Mother, might say she led a successful life, but Ela didn’t.
Eventually, her life came to an abrupt end when a random hiker backpacking through the woods crushed her underneath his expensive hiking boot and walked on completely oblivious to what had just happened. He went on to start his own fishery, and was mildly successful until all the fish in his area went extinct and he was forced into bankruptcy, but that is an unimportant detail.
Ela, meanwhile, as she lay dying, just wished there could have been more to life.
“Quit your sulking,” Mother Nature said to her one last time. “Your life isn’t some bleak tear-jerker any more than it’s a romance. Your purpose is to grow up, mate, lay eggs, and die. Emotions, other beetles, right and wrong, they count for nothing. But you did a good job, and I’m proud of you, my daughter.”
Ela disagreed. With great effort, she uttered her last words. “Do I have a Father? I want to hear what he has to say.”
Works Cited
1. Berenbaum, May R. Bugs in the System: Insects and their Impact on Human Affairs. Basic Books, 1995.
2. Evans, M. E. G. 1972. The jump of the click beetle (Coleoptera:Elateridae) - a preliminary study. Journal of Zoology. 167:319-336
3. Evans, M. E. G. 1973. The jump of the click beetle (Coleoptera: Elateridae) - energetics and mechanics. Journal of Zoology. 169:181-194
4. Frantsevich, Leonid. 2004. Righting kinematics in beetles (Insecta: Coleoptera). Arthropod Structure & Development. 33 (3):221-235
5. Furlan, L. 2004. The biology of Agriotes sordidus Illiger (Col., Elateridae). Journal of Applied Entomology. 128 (9-10):696-706
6. Gronenberg, W. 1996. Fast actions in small animals: Springs and click mechanisms. Journal of Comparative Physiology. 178 (6):727-734
7. McGavin, George C. Insects, Spiders, and Other Terrestrial Arthropods. New York: Dorling Kindersley Inc., 2000.
8. Merivee, Enno; Rahi, Mart; Luik, Anne. 1997. Distribution of olfactory and some other antennal sensilla in the male click beetle Agriotes obscurus L. (Coleoptera: Elateridae). International Journal of Insect Morphology & Embryology. 26 (2):75-83
9. Rothschild, Miriam; Schlein, J.; Parker, K.; Neville, C.; Sternberg, S. 1975. The jumping mechanism of Xenopsylla cheopis III. Execution of the jump and activity. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B-Biological Sciences. 271 (914):499-514
10. Sannasi, A. 1969. Resilin in the cuticle of click beetles. Journal of the Georgia Entomological Society. 4:31-32.
987
« on: May 22, 2011, 11:51:13 PM »
(Image removed from quote.)
Haha, I was waiting for some of these featuring RA2 bots. We need some with SFTW that gives out bad building advice.
988
« on: May 22, 2011, 11:32:40 PM »
Not all Christians agree that the rapture will happen though. The Bible never specifically mentions a rapture event; there is only indirect evidence that it MIGHT happen. Personally I just think it's wishful thinking. The Christians will suffer through the tribulation like everyone else. Actually probably more than everyone else.
What the Bible does say clearly is that no one knows the day or the hour when Jesus will return to Earth... so you know that if anyone ever predicts Jesus' return, you automatically know they are wrong.
989
« on: May 22, 2011, 11:21:44 PM »
If only he had a convenient signal like Batman does...
(Image removed from quote.)
Lol that is a win. 
990
« on: May 22, 2011, 10:28:57 PM »
STACKMAN!
If only he had a convenient signal like Batman does...
@Sonny - a little late there... I feel like something in that comic is going over my head though.
991
« on: May 22, 2011, 10:22:41 PM »
We had a pokemon thread, but it got deleted because of tons of swearing in it. Anyways I did until I completed it and got all the pokemon on my current team to lv 100
Is that what happened to it?? I thought it just died... B/W took steps in the right direction; it has a bit more of an involved story and has a lot of technical advancements such as random wi-fi battles and the whole global link thing (although I hate the fact that you can't grow berries in-game, only in the dream world). What they need to do now is really shake up some of the main quest traditions... get different starters than fire/water/grass, make your main character not a kid setting out on a Pokemon journey from his little four-house town (maybe you start out as the League champion but you get all your Pokemon stolen in a cut-scene and set out on a quest for vengeance), make the main character talk and interact... maybe make other playable characters that join your party too, each with different abilities. Or change the setting, like set it in the dark ages when Pokemon are summoned from the spirit realm rather than stored in pokeballs (actually weirdly makes more sense) or set it in the distant future. There's tons of cool stuff they could do without messing up the success formula.
992
« on: May 22, 2011, 10:04:19 PM »
Swap out another component besides the axe for the forklift. :P
993
« on: May 22, 2011, 09:24:38 PM »
Heh, I just thought about downsizing Anathema 3 a couple minutes ago. Now I know what not to do, at least.
If it doesn't "troll dance" (as I recall though, troll dancing is when drums or VS's balance on their weapon like a unicycle trying to self right, isn't it?)... anyway, if it doesn't destabilize and the chassis start spinning, it needs a stronger weapon motor... dual Mag perhaps? Couldn't easily go bigger than that.
The front skirts seem unnecessary (although they do look cool); you can probably get rid of them or at least downgrade them for extra weight.
994
« on: May 22, 2011, 09:12:36 PM »
Looks really good. But would it be better if you put the beater bars on the edge attach points of the discs? Then you wouldn't risk losing the beaters before the razors (although that is already unlikely) and it would protect the motors better.
Speaking of protecting the motors, it might be better if the outside spinners were Piglets like the original, so HS couldn't break the motors easily.
995
« on: May 22, 2011, 09:04:17 PM »
On the HS, you can attach the drive to the sides of the flipper segment stabilizer, then eliminate those extenders and save 12 kgs. What Pwnator means with the beater bars is that the flipper segments on the weapon are a weak link. All it takes is 1000 damage to that spot (which isn't hard to hit) and there goes your 6000 HP weapon. You can use beater bars as extenders and do some clever rotating to get the weapons angled. The beater bars will still be a weak link but they'll at least have much more HP and will do some damage too.
996
« on: May 22, 2011, 08:46:15 PM »
Massive HS is massive.
Sai (did you even read that Wikipedia article you linked to Pwn; it's sai plural and singular, not sais) look longer than Vlad spikes but the collision is actually shorter. The tip of the sai doesn't collide. So Vlad spikes are the right choice here unless you want something with no normals.
For the instability... perhaps a tribar setup with less Vlad spikes per prong?
997
« on: May 22, 2011, 06:50:26 PM »
Erm, I believe those are blood drips, not flames. Great skin work regardless and very accurate replica.
998
« on: May 22, 2011, 06:44:41 PM »
Is it just me or is the right disc angled out further than the left disc?
Anyway it's a really cool bot.
999
« on: May 22, 2011, 06:23:05 PM »
Well your computer has two types of memory. There's your disk drive memory that's used to store files and whatnot. Then you have virtual memory, which is used to store temporary data while a program is running. When you have bots driving around and crashing together on your screen, that's much different from just having a bunch of .bot files sitting in your Robot Designs folder. While it doesn't take up any more disk space, the computer needs virtual memory to process all of that.
Same goes for any other program. The more advanced and flashy it is, the more memory it needs. So games typically need a lot of virtual memory to run. If you're low on virtual memory, you can do a couple things:
- Close any other programs you have running, especially memory hogs like Photoshop.
- Get a RAM upgrade. Computers don't generally come with all the optimal components and you can get a memory upgrade for relatively cheaply. If you have 1024 MB and no other programs running you should be fine though.
1000
« on: May 22, 2011, 06:03:47 PM »
The updated link on your first post says grids2.rar, but it linked to grids.rar. I fixed it so it links to grids2.rar.
What exactly did you update, aside from putting Xzibit in there? More accuracy?
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