Random insane concepts for mutators!

[Que]

No one thought to create a mod where you can headshot with other projectiles?

[Gustavo6046]

How about one with randomly spawning Nali Cows and fruit that have inheritable genes.

I have a detailed idea, but it's mostly just my own mental conception of it.

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· The Genes ·

The gist of it is that the two important parts of the mutator, the cow and the fruit, both have inheritable traits, and a tendency to reproduce which can be affected by those traits.

For the cows:

• a gene for drop on death item type (health, armour, cluster explosion, invisibility, etc) - incl. affecting bot desireability to kill this cow - the effect on death will be displayed as a hologram over the cow
• a gene for how armoured they are
• a gene for how fast they are
• a gene for how many cow eggs they lay
• a gene for how tough a cow egg is
• a gene for how tough a cow egg is
• a gene for how big a cow is, affects both collision radius and health

For the fruit:

• how much energy they provide to cows
• how many seeds a cow gets in their gut upon eating this fruit (periodically laid when the cow's, um, idle, or burst and spread around the cow when the cow dies)
• what kind of input speeds up plant growth (damage? proximity to lightsources? distance from living beings? etc)
• how much a plant can heal/poison players (usually a seed is replanted in the nearby area)

The more armoured, faster, and bigger a cow is, the faster it drains energy; they can also only lay eggs if their energy level. Similarly, the # of seeds and cow-energy a fruit provides, affects how long it takes to mature.

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· The AI ·

A cow can also Tell how much energy the closest fruit to it has.in it.

A cow has three actions it can take, and whenever idle, will periodically check for which to do:

• Graze to recover a bit of energy
• Forage for nearby fruit to eat
• Poop out a seed in its gut
• Wander like a doofus

Each time it checks what it wants to do, it .actually issues a neural network with some information, then the highest output corresponds to the action it takes. This is where information it can Tell comes into play.

Such information, and a hidden state, those are the inputs to the neural network. The outputs include the corresponding action that is taken, as well as a hidden state update.

The hidden state consists of 8 numbers. There are also two hidden layers (between input and output), both of size 16, or something.

​ (Note: a hidden state is NOT the same as a hidden layer! If you want to know more about it, there are many good primers on neural networks on the internet. They're actually relatively simple, at least conceptually. Here's a good one from YouTube.)

Here's some of the information that would be the input.

• Current health, divided by max health
• Current damage, aka, (max_health - health) / max_health
• Current energy, divided by max energy
• Proximity to closest matured fruit in sight, or 0 if none
• Energy of closest matured fruit in sight, or 0 if none
• Proximity to closest projectile in sight, or 0 if none

where proximity is basically something along the lines of, say, P(distance) = 1 / (1 + distance / 160).

Another interesting experiment would be to enable cows to kinda 'fight' each other. Or even to have them release "pheromone turds", which are like signals the presence of which could be picked up on by the neural networks of other cows, akin to that of nearby projectiles or matured fruit.

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· Conclusion ·

Obviously there is a lot of ideas here, and most of them are liable to Occam's Razor. In fact, you could do something similar with something other than cows and fruit. (I've even tried doing it with weapons! Without much success.)

Rather, the core idea is something that reproduces, has inheritable traits, and some sort of selective pressure. The rest is lard.

[papercoffee]

sounds more like a simulator kind of thing and less like a real playable mod/mutator...

[Gustavo6046]

Truuuue... But hey, the cows have ingame effects! They can drop different things! And being desireable to being killed by players/bots is usually bad, but can counterintuitively be good if they have seeds in them!

...Yeah, you're right, it's going too far haha.

[Neon_Knight]

Not sure if mentioned.

There are some mutators/options and gametypes in other games that switch the players' weapons every X game minutes. For example, you start with solely the Enforcer, and fight with it, after 5 minutes everyone loses the Enforcer and switch to the Pulse Gun, everyone fights with it, and after 5 more minutes everyone switches to the Rocket Launcher. The next weapon is always random so no two matches are the same.

I'd extend that to a) all the registered weapons, b) extra powers such as those granted by the Relics, c) both of them, d) other source of abilities/powers.