The best approach is to keep the brains in your head, and have a human observer control the entire team through messaging. This will allow the bots to only handle low-level activities, and while this doesn't classify as a fully autonomous team, they are still not borgs but bots. You gain an advantage of being able to just watch the galactic and play the role of "commander," while the bot grunts do the work. In fact, there might be no reason at all to look at the local window. Darryl -----Original Message----- From: vanilla-list-admin at us.netrek.org [mailto:vanilla-list-admin at us.netrek.org]On Behalf Of Brian Paulsen Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 12:05 PM To: vanilla-list at us.netrek.org Subject: Re: [Vanilla List] organized, intelligent 'bots I'm not sure you really want to do that. One strange seg fault could crash the whole system. A better approach is to have the brains of the operation be a separate process that each of the bots communicate with. This would allow you to put the bot brains on to a separate machine (for CPU reasons) and then divide the bots up on to other machines. If one bot crashes, you don't lose 7 others along with it. Also, you then don't have to worry about people using global variables. Cleaning up the code is going to be a major project and really isn't worth it. Brian -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature Size: 3043 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/netrek-dev/attachments/20011210/f118a9fa/smime.bin