The design screen treads tab has the head description.
Oh, and about the design screen: SQUEEEEEE!!! I absolutely love the design and execution of it! The added aspect of mix/match of parts to suit the bot programming (ie not just cosmetic) is crazy-good-fun.
I’m still trying to figure out (desing-wise) how to have radar return a distance - id like to do a spin-survey, then head toward the nearest wall. It will also help now that lasers have a range. (maybe a return of bot-in-range, bot-out-of-range, or wall-close, wall-medium-wall-far. Hmm. In-range and out-of-range is sufficient to decide fire or move, not so much for walls…)
More chips… How about a self-destruct? or repair. Maybe absolute directions (“turn north”). About-face. No-op :-). Surrender? Cloaking! Omni-directional proximity check (ping) that doesn’t tell direction, but gives range to closest bot.
How about chips that let bots communicate? IFF code chips maybe.
Wow @Mark, this is a super update! I like how the hardware and software of the bot will now have to work together. The bouncing bump thing is interesting and a good way to introduce some randomness. I noticed your lasers are measured in kilometres rather than kilowatts…
@Bortels, right now radar distance and firing distance are locked together, so if you can see it you can shoot it. On game balance, I think the mid-power gun can currently shoot a bit too far.
I wonder if there’s a better way than radar to give wall distances? Something like a GPS sensor? Trying to implement the maze game without something better than bump is um, problematic.
Still, I run into the “responding to a number problem”, which I really haven’t solved for any chip. I just can’t think how to design it.
I’m getting ready to implement shields and self-repair. Instead of having them happen automatically, as they do in this update, I’m thinking on and off chips.
@Fred, thanks. I think I’m going to make the short-range gun fire lightning and the mid-range more of a cannon. But they probably won’t be measured in kilometers!
So (for the moment at least) the solution to implementing maze is in the form of “tracks.” like skeet or other bots, tracks register as a ping on the radar, but they can’t be shot. Instead they disappear when stepped on. This, combined with allowing walls to truncate radar, makes it possible to crawl the maze, so long as its liberally sprinkled with tracks.
+ Chase game
+ Revisions to Melee, Maze, and Skeet
+ Smooth turns that reflect the speed of the various tread units
+ Shields on / off commands and graphics
+ Damage graphics for each type of component
+ Revised impact graphic to show when a bot is hit
+ Disabled bots now fade to near invisibility and don't distract active bots
+ Horn and pen up / down for those more interested in making the robot play "turtle"
+ Touching countdown timer ends a competition (thanks, @Bortels)
Still to go
- Save / Load (that's the big remaining task)
- Self-repair routines
- Robothon auto run through of all four games
- High score posting
Getting ready to finally submit this to the store as ChipBot Combat. The title screen and tips are… well, ugly is the word, but lots of little things have finally been tightened down. I would post it in a git hub, but there’s enough code now that it’s gotten rather clumsy.
So, after a long session of beating out bugs and drawing half-***ed graphics for icons and title pages, I finally submitted ChipBots to the App Store. Many thanks to @Reefwing for the tutorials, which were invaluable in pointing the way around some of the intricacies of the submission process. And of course, a double-heaping of thanks to @Simeon.
Naturally, now that it’s in the “waiting for approval” status, I’ve already noticed some problems–mostly with the shield/auto-repair mechanic–that allow the creation of unstopable killing machines. So I’ll start drafting up version 1.1, but I’m not going to attempt to roll it out until I hear from Apple about 1.0 and understand any mistakes I may have made in submitting the app.
Oh, and the name got changed to just plain “ChipBots.” I showed it to a FIRST Robotics team at a local school, and got the comment that the word “Combat” in the title might make it harder for groups like FIRST to be involved with using the App. So, while I think the Combat title still appears on the “about” screen, it’s just plain ChipBots from here on out.
