The recent competition announcement got me thinking about programming games (like Robocode etc.,) and thought it might be an interesting project to make something combining my not so secret love of lua and my desire to learn how to program better AI into some sort of game / sandbox type project.

Downside is all the ones I've seen are just like Robocode, tanks that shoot each other, and while that's fun it does seem a bit pointless to reinvent someone else's wheel. One thing that is good about these is you can have working code range from spinning around firing randomly (in only a few lines of code) all the way up to AI that learns from past experience and predicts the patterns of behavior in the opponent. This obviously means that its possible to spend minutes or months working on a robot.

Been reading through 'Programming Game AI by example' and the flocking behavior makes me think that team based *something* would be interesting.

Wouldn't look at at producing anything sale-able from this, just more a project to work on that might interest a couple of other people into a competition or something.

Any one got thoughts or comments or ideas on these types of games and suggestions for ideas that are possibly a bit different to tanks but still have achievable goals and would work in a competition type format?

Nick

Edit: Should probably be in 'Game Design' not sure what I was thinking when I put it in Language Agnostic - sorry

_________________
www.littlemonkey.co.nz

Football (Soccer) is popular with the robotics crowd. It would require co-ordination and communication between the team members.

I don't think the level of intelligence required is that high if the current crop of 'stars' in the UK are anything to go by.

_________________
10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

A simpler idea could be a laser game. The game has two teams with maybe 5 players each.

Each player can move in 2D space and has a mirror, which can be rotated through 360 degrees, independent of walking direction.

The goal is to reflect a source beam into your team's goal, and collect seconds of laser time. Your opponent team can try to move to intercept the beam and direct it into their own goal.

Players can physically block other players.

After 3 minutes of play, the winner is the team with the most seconds of laser time.

_________________
I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

Good ideas, I like the football idea but it might be complicated. Lasers are good because they travel in straight lines and are instant.

I guess step one is to get some scriptable AI together and then look at how to put together some sort of goal.

I'll keep every posted (or more likely come back and ask when I get stuck ).

Cheers

_________________
www.littlemonkey.co.nz

Have you made any progress with your project, Dig?

I hope you are okay in NZ with the shaky ground you've had this week.

_________________
I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

I'm talking to Nick right now; he's fine. He's pretty busy with work right now, so it might be a bit before he finds this.

Just thought I'd pass it along that he's OK.

_________________
What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Some very minor progress, I'm going to keep plugging away at it in my spare time though.

As Clint mentioned quite busy this week, the Earthquake was a way away from me but very tragic and consuming a lot of my attention at the moment! My friends and family down there are all ok as well. Unforetunatly that's not the case for everyone down there .

_________________
www.littlemonkey.co.nz