Custom structures

The simulated agents interact with simulated structures (model.structure.Structure). In the simulation, structures, just like primitive interactions, do not in themselves have a semantic meaning. The semantics of a structure come from the interaction logic manipulating that structure.

It is possible to create custom structures, and to manipulate existing structures. For example, food can be created as such:

class Food(Structure):
    """
    Class representing food.
    """

    color = (62, 179, 122, 255) # RGBA

    def collidable(self):
        return False

Note, again, that this structure does not in itself carry any semantics as to what “food” means. It simply defines the structure to have a certain color, and defines the structure to be non-collidable (i.e., agents can pass through it).

By default, a structure is collidable, and has a width and a height of 1. The collidability of a structure can be overriden as above, by implementing the collidable method. The width and height can be set within the class definition through self.width and self.height, or (even after instantiating the structure) through the set_width and set_height methods respectively. For example:

class Exp(experiment.Experiment):
    # ...

    def __init__(self):
        # ...
        block = model.structure.Block()
        block.set_position((1,2))
        block.set_height(2)
        # ...