Re: [spoon-discuss] Junk

[Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday, December 23, 2003, at 08:16 PM, Baron von Skippy wrote:

> > 	The robots are battery operated, starting with 100 units of energy,
> > and unable to exceed 150 units; any robot action takes some energy
> > (moving is 15, digging into a filled square is 20, etc.). They also
> > have solar panels to replenish their power - each robot gains 20 
> > energy
> > back every nweek, unless they're in a tunnel under the Junk.	
> -I like everything about this except for nweeks as opposed to 
> checkpoints and "20 energy back every nweek." That seems a little low, 
> given that that's an nweek of digging - potentially, one could spend 
> two nweeks moving into a tunnel, two digging, two returning, and then 
> five doing /nothing./ That's 11 nweeks, or about five and a half 
> months, all taken for two 1/20 chances of finding a Shiny Thing. I'd 
> say make it a move every checkpoint and at least 30 energy gained per 
> checkpoint in the sun, if not more, and an ability (or the promise of 
> a proposal later on to create this ability) to strap more panels on 
> your robot and/or leave a generator in the sun to tap into at your 
> leisure, both of which would speed up recharge.

I definitely intend to create upgrades that can bolster both the rate 
of recharge and the total amount that can be stored. I also picture 
things like some sort of spotlight that can be used to replenish 
another robot's energy, so one could stand out in the sun and provide 
power to another's bot inside the Mound. Also, I expect there to be 
upgrades that might, say, reduce the cost of digging, or allow you to 
consume scrap metal for energy, or maybe to leech power off of another 
robot.

So basically, it's designed to suck, to encourage the creation of 
interesting things.

It does suck slightly more than I meant it to, though - I meant for 
digging to move you to the location you dug.
Also note that a bot could excavate all around a large Mound while 
still being relatively close to sunlight - on the map I generated in 
the original post, there are only four locations that aren't adjacent 
to either a 1 or a 0.

Mind you, I do intend to sit down and actually craft a map sometime, 
rather than using that random one. But even there, I doubt there'll be 
too many really deep squares, unless we make the Grid much larger.



With regards to RoboRally, I've never played that but it sounds 
interesting. Perhaps we could make a set of basic commands, and each 
player would submit a list of commands, so that a computer script could 
interpret and execute them:

MOVE UP
DIG LEFT
USE Laser Cannon ON BvS
etc.

In a setup such as ours, how would script order be determined? i.e., if 
I and Rob both instruct our bots to move to the same space, which of us 
gets there? Or do neither of us do so?

In some ways this reminds of Diplomacy, where orders are written down, 
and then all revealed at once. It makes it very easy to set up very 
intricate plans, and even easier to knock them down.

I like it.

--
Wonko


--
Wonko
Award Wonko a Win.
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