Re: a general question about commands...

From: thompson@spot.Colorado.EDU (THOMPSON BENJAMIN RHINELANDER)

Date: Fri, 17 Mar 1995 21:18:03 +0000

In article <D5FyA3.Bsz@murdoch.acc.virginia.edu>,
Greg Lindahl <gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> wrote:
>In article <3jl8fa$7sh@CUBoulder.Colorado.EDU>,
>
>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.

>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.
Learning to design a decent fighter in CW will give you insight into
assembler languages but it isn't as satisfying as designing a stealth
starfighter to penetrate your enemy's orbital defense grid. And as far
as I know nobody has made any large CW programs that can do significantly
better than the small virus-style ones. C++ Robots is a small stage for
a language as powerful as C++: in order to play it at all, the player must
master the basics of C++, which is more work than most people want to do
to play a game. I'm in the process of trying to build a language which
is a) flexible enough to allow some fairly interesting behavior on the part
of the robots, and b) simple and readable enough that it won't kill
all the fun.

>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.

--
Do not be lulled by my present condition,
Psmith. There are only 35 of you.

rec.games.pbm

Re: a general question about commands...

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