Re: a general question about commands...

From: gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)

Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 22:21:40 +0000

In article <3kcuab$i0u@CUBoulder.Colorado.EDU>,
THOMPSON  BENJAMIN RHINELANDER <thompson@spot.Colorado.EDU> wrote:
>In article <D5FyA3.Bsz@murdoch.acc.virginia.edu>,
>Greg Lindahl <gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> wrote:

>>Such a game would be very cool in its own way. Another genre that
>>would work well would be a space game in which information travels at
>>the speed of light. You would program your fleets to attempt to act
>>intelligently while away from your home world.
>
>You anticipate me sir! That's exactly what I hope to get running
>eventually, but for the moment I want to test the concept in a simpler
>arena.

Well, anything can be made simple ;-) One thing that I would advise,
though, is giving a lot of feedback to the players. For example,
assume that a ship can send information back to the homeworld at the
same speed that the ship can travel, and have ships send back a lot of
info, so that players can see when their programs go wrong. That way
you don't have the problem of new players writing faulty programs and
having their ships leave and never report back. Boring.

>>However, my guess is that the number of players interested in playing
>>would be small. Compare the number of players playing Core Wars or C++
>>Robots to the number of players playing Diplomacy.
>
>True. But neither of those games was optimised for ease of play: Redcode,
>the language of Core Wars, is simply assembler language with a funny accent.

While Redcode is very baroque and probably limits the Core Wars
community severly, C++ Robots isn't that bad. If you look at the
subset of the language that people actually use, there's no OO stuff
and no pointers -- just variables, loops, if statements, and
subroutine calls.  Basic, C, C++, Pascal, all the algol-like languages
look the same for this kind of stuff.  You'd be hard pressed to come
up with a language which is any simpler -- all C++Robots needs is a
small tutorial to become pretty user(idiot)-friendly.  Moreover, you
don't want to get bogged down in designing your own language,
something which has fascinated the computer science field to no end
for many, many years.

>>But, if you wrote such a game, I'm sure you'd find at least a small
>>group of willing players.
>
>If you want to take a look at what I've done so far, send me a line of
>email. I don't have a mail-filter set up yet to allow processing of
>turns, but I would like your opinion of the game mechanics.

Sure, I'd be happy to comment. I've got my red pens and my
flamethrower right here ;-) ;-)

-- g

References

Re: a general question about commands...
thompson@spot.Colorado.EDU (THOMPSON BENJAMIN RHINELANDER)
Fri, 17 Mar 1995 21:18:03 +0000