jdavis@husc3.harvard.edu (04/11/91)
It seems that people are a bit disgruntled with some of the new robot-combat games out there. There is a new game of this genre that will be out in (we expect) 2 months. A *very* basic description of the game is that you write a robot (in your choice of "assembly language" or "BASIC") to hunt and kill other robots in a square arena. Movement is *not* grid-based: positions are calculated to small fractions of pixels. You can specify just about every aspect of your robots' abilities, from acceleration rate to scan-angle width to bullet speed. Our "BASIC" language contains IF-THEN-ELSE, FOR-NEXT, and REPEAT-UNTIL constructs, as well as SIN, COS, and ARCTAN (SQRT is not necessary or useful in this system). I hope people are willing to wait for this game. In the meantime, while we are polishing up the final pieces, we would like to ask the net for any suggestions that you think may be useful. What limitations *don't* you want to see in a new (and hopefully the *last* of the new) robot-combat games? Are there any other BASIC constructions that would be useful? Any suggestions you make will be seriously considered. Please don't post the suggestions here, though, as I doubt the rest of the net cares much :-) If you have any specific questions about features of the new system (I've been purposefully vague in this post), I'll do my best to answer them. Thanks, Jason Davis Future Generation Software jdavis@husc3.harvard.edu