@Mark Thank you for your update. It looks cool!. I love GUI in Code menu. I have a few suggestions.
When I make some change and don’t want to save, it does not provide a button to cancel the change on Design and Code menu. For firing the weapon, can it fire in a specific distance for example 5 meters? I think right now the ship can fire in the long length ( or screen length).
@sanit, the three different weapons should have different firing ranges. The first can go the full length of the screen, but causes only light damage. The second has a shorter range, and packs much more oomph. The third goes only about three times the width of a bot, but should take out an unshelled bot in a couple of shots.
Right now, I think the middle gun has too long a range. Plus I plan to add unique animations for each weapon.
Back in 1985, I was hired by Silicon Beach to write an “editor where you can’t make a syntax error” for a project. I had something like blocky in mind, but the PM was focused on this structure of linking lists that I found ugly. Eventually, the whole thing fell apart when Silicon Beach was snapped up by Adobe. Probably for the best.
I’m not going to get that complex… At least not in Battle Chips I. Maybe in some future version.
But I am still adding chips. I’m trying to work out a maze game at the moment, but man, it’s difficult to solve a maze using the current controls.
Update coming tonight. Includes two “daughter boards” that can be used as sub routines and which triple the space for programs. A new “Maze” mode challenges you to build a bot that can follow a set of tracks between twisting walls.
Getting closer to the home stretch.
I actually starting coding this game as a diversion on the day my wife went into chemotherapy for non-Hodgkins lymphoma. It has all been coded either at bedside, or in the waiting room, at Siteman Cancer Center or in various hospitals. Today I’m happy to say she is finishing her course of chemo. God willing, we’ll get good news from thext week’s PET scan and one phase of this horror will be behind us. Since the program is not done, I guess I’ll have to take it home with me,
Note: You’ll also see commands for turning on / off shields and conducting repairs. This is not yet implemented, and using these codes may cause unpredictable results.
In case the maze is baffling you, here’s a quick sample of a bot designed to run the maze. This one won’t get much beyond halfway before time runs out, but it should give you the idea.
Main Board
1 Radar 16
2 Bump 19
3 Board A
4 Repeat 4
5 Forward
16 Forward
17 Bump 19
19 Turn Left
Board A
1 Radar 16
2 Turn Right
16 Forward
While this bot is only middling, it’s quite possible to Mae a bot that gathers up all the tracks and earns bonus points. Give it a try.
Love it! Great! Quick suggestion: A lot of people here seem to want to share their bots. Any chance you could make a place where you can load and download bots? I love this and imagine it will be a success on the app store.
I still haven’t worked out a way for people to post bots. I had hoped to do it with images, but while 1.4 exposes image import / export to the developer, there’s not an obvious way to give it to users.
I’m thinking that my only choice is to create a web site to handle upload / download of bots.
@Mark I know it adds a little difficulty, but you could patch the runtime with @tnlogy’s image picker extension and use that. You would have to replace his pickImage function with a dud function for developing on iPad, but it would get the feature in there for the finished product.
@Simeon, I’m struggling for any way people can exchange bots (image, text, etc) that won’t require me to set up a web site to act as a nexus for exchange. I’ll grasp any straw offered.
+ 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
- Import / Export so you can share 'bots (that's the big remaining task)
- Self-repair routines (code is there, but doesn't currently do anything in battle)
- Robothon auto run through of all four games
- High score posting
I didn’t know about this. I was still thinking back to games like RobotWars on the Apple II. Thanks for this! I’m sure they’ve come up with plenty of good ideas I could incorporate.