Creatures interface

[Marina Vaillant]

Here I think is better to discuss what a creature can do.

Yves' suggestions seem good to me for a start.

I read the creature would be facing a direction, and could only move in this direction or would have to rotate first. Would the rotation take one turn???
I thought at first the creatures would be so simple you could go in any direction (N, S, W, E).
Then if the creatures faces a direction, why should it see behind??
But I agree it should see all around, to have better information in order to escape a strong opponent.

Could it see 2 cells in front?? so there would be an advantage to face a direction. It could see longer in front. :)

When scanning does it get info about the current cell too??
I suggest yes.

So according to my suggestion, scanning would give info about 10 cells (8 around, 1 in front further, and the current one).

Then can a creature attack another creature on its cell or in front of it?

How will the fight be solved??? According to how much it has eaten, it will be stronger and the stronger will beat the weaker?
In the result of an attack, is a creature always dead and the other a bit tired (weaker?) ? Or only both weaker according to some percentage of strength??
This may be not creature interface, but would be interesting to know in order to attack or not.

This leads me to : when do we know the other creature's strength? When we scan around and see there is a creature, does it give its caracteristics too? or do we have to scan specifically a creature too???

Have you seen on everyday.com website, the space game that is with a real simplistic interface? It is a trade and fight game. Maybe interesting. For each turn, you can scan where you can go, or scan a specific neighbouring position, or another player, or a planet.

Come on, discussion open!! :)

Marina

[Gabriel Fleseriu]

Marina,

1. Have you seen the Environment rules (http://www.codeguru.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=226660) thread?

2. You should really download the demo project I posted and have a look at the "codewar.h" file.

But I agree with you, the rules are far from being completely defined. I think we should start simple and enhance the rules and features in time. There are two things I dislike at the current draft of the rules:

- the too complicated cell scanning rule (see the codewar.h file for a little ASCII art on how that looks like)
- the fact that rotating (i.e. N->W->S->E) takes a turn.

I think both make the creature AI too complicated for the beginning.

I already said this, but I will stress it out again: IMHO we should aim at a first version that is as simple as possible and have that version running. Many people seem to be eager to propose a lot of cool features, but I haven't seen one dang line of code yet, excepting the code I have posted.