OpenEuphoria

Re: Slow Text-gui

• Posted by Robert B Pilkington <bpilkington at JUNO.COM> Jan 19, 1998
• 765 views

>Some newbies asked for ideas for programming. Here is mine. I think
>any competitive members of the list will find it interesting.
>
>How about a multiplayer game, where the skill is not in strategy or
>reactions, but programming skill. Pitting different people's code
against each
>other and seeing which comes out top. It is a bit like AI I suppose and
could
>turn into a full game. The scenario could be an aerial dogfight or
something
>simple like a maze. Each player would have a routine, each rountine
would be
>called in turn and given all the variables in order to make its
decision. Does
>anybody fancy the idea ?

There are a couple of games that do that. The best one (I've seen two) is
Robot Battle. The robots are tanks, consisting of three things. The body,
which is the main part, and can turn and has the treads. It has the
slowest turning rate. It moves in the direction the torso is facing. You
can call up a variable to find out exactly which direction you are
facing. The second part is the turret, and moves a bit faster. You fire
in that direction, and you can call up a variable to see which direction
it is facing. The third is the radar, or sensor, which has the fastest
turning rate, and can of course, you can call up a variable in the
scripting language to see where that is facing so when you find a robot
you can aim your turret at it. There are several nice language features,
like events. You can make any routine happen on an event (such as
colliding, getting hit, detecting an enemy), and then you can change it
to a different routine next time the event happens (to create a less
predictable pattern).

This is one idea you can do, and is pretty cool. The author holds a
contest to see who has the best robots. Two contests for each version.
(You have to pay him an entry fee, but where else would he get the money
to pay the winner and runners up?)

Another idea you could do for this is let the programmer know certain
variables that he can access from an Euphoria E file. Use code similar to
this, I guess:

constant PLAYERS = 4
include player1.e
if players >= 2 then
    include player2.e
end if
if players >= 3 then
    include player3.e
end if

and so on for the maximum players.

There are global variables that the .e file can access and the programmer
codes in Euphoria to see what he can do with those variables to survive.
You can place the arrays together like this:

big_array = player1   -- player1 is player 1's entire array
if PLAYERS >= 2 then
    big_array = big_array & {player2}
end if

and so on.

I'm sure there are plenty other ways, but here are the ideas anyway.
Hope somebody can do something with them. :)