On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 08:13:41PM -0600, Darryl Palmer Jr wrote: > 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. It may be difficult to dynamically manage 5 or more separate objectives from a message window. Then again, perhaps that would be the mark of a true commander... I still want a team that functions completely independent of human instruction. However, I don't see any harm in ensuring that the code properly separates the low-level combat and targetting engines from the higher level objective determination code. If properly implemented, this would allow for the objective determination code to function independently, or for it to only accept instructions from an observing "commander". This applies to lower levels as well. Specific defensive patterns or offensive patterns could be inserted into the code that normally 'adapts' as a form of override. The observing commander could instruct the team to "F3,F4,F5: ogg R2 using pattern delta-5, sync on F4". Specifically, this would aid in the implementation and debugging of individual patterns. It would also look very startrek-like to an observer. After all, isn't it the computers job to target enemies? :-) In the future, who in their right mind would always disable the auto-pilot? mark -- mark at mielke.cc/markm at ncf.ca/markm at nortelnetworks.com __________________________ . . _ ._ . . .__ . . ._. .__ . . . .__ | Neighbourhood Coder |\/| |_| |_| |/ |_ |\/| | |_ | |/ |_ | | | | | | \ | \ |__ . | | .|. |__ |__ | \ |__ | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them... http://mark.mielke.cc/