[Polyworld-develop] New FoodPatch objects support structured food distribution

[Larry Y. <lsy...@be...>]

Quoting the news tidbit I just posted, to make sure all developers 
know about this somewhat substantial change...

Both FoodBands and the original uniform random distribution of food 
have been replaced with Matt Whitehead's new FoodPatch objects. They 
allow any number of rectangular or elliptical patches, with any 
amount of food and arbitrary food growth rates distributed uniformly, 
with a linear probability distribution, or with a Gaussian/normal 
probability distribution, either probabilistically or 
rigidly/deterministically. 
 
A new worldfile (now version 19) has been checked in that shows how 
to use them (although a known problem with complexity as a fitness 
function will make the code crash after a fairly short time with this 
worldfile). 
 
A FoodPatchNotes.pdf document from Matt on how food patches were 
designed and how they work is in the docs/ directory.

- larryy

P.S. If SourceForge's servers don't strip it, I'm attaching a 
"worldfile_patchtest" that is kind of fun to run, once, just to see 
very different and dramatic patch densities, shapes, and growth rates.