Second Life Robot Wars

Trent Hedges introduced the brilliant idea of a possible Secondlife Junkyard Wars in this forum.

I don't mean to steal any thunder but I have a related idea that...I don't know, perhaps could be united with the Junk Wars or might remain an idea on its own.

I'm hesitant to bring this up because of my previous Secondlife obligations and current (numerous) other projects, but I think the Robot Wars format would lend itself to Second Life extremely well. Chosen Few and I were speaking about this the other day and it seemed the more we kicked the idea around, the more feasable it seemed.

I've got plenty of land in many Sims...But I picked up a parcel last night in Agent that is about a thousand meters square which would be perfect for the arena.

The total land I have in that sim comes to something like eight thousand square meters total which would boost that prim limit pretty high, but it could be on a contained, remote parcel in a remote sim.

Again I'm hesitant to bring this up now, but gosh I think it would be such great fun to do...two teams making robots to go against each other. What limits would be necessary? How would we determine victory? Would the devices be remotely controlled, or would they be autonomous? What about things that don't use physics? How could they be defeated? Should there be categories of competition?

The mind (or at least the one I have a lease on) boggles!

I solicit your comments!

Lumiere

another awesome idea!

personally, i thiknk there should be a sim dedicated to these types of things.. a sim with 2 or 4 arenas.. one for JunkYard Wars, one for Robot Wars.. one for CCG types.. and another for other types (PvP? Battle Pit?)

but, back to your Robot Wars..

great idea! my only suggestion is.. perhaps restrict all robots to being physics-enabled ONLY?

I quite agree on the physics/non-physics question...but this will take a lot of codification and thought. When Chosen Few and I discussed this, the idea of having categories of competition really struck me as one of the ways to go.

How do you defeat a non-physics enabled bot? Wouldn't that elevate the degree of creativity needed to win? If a machine is physical it could 'touch' other machines...but if it's not, then how would it win? Of course they could phase in and out as needed but I think it would be best to have different classes of competition.

Judging this could be very complicated. Should judges have access to the scripts of the bots playing in competition? I can imagine people would have trouble letting these things out if that judge would one day become their competition. If this route were taken, judges would have to have a lot of knowledge and be able to make their way through possibly obfuscated code.

Personally I'd want people with THAT level of knowledge to be contestants rather than judges. So what could we do?

Lots of issues to ponder. But in the mean time I'll start thinking about building the arena.

I could really really really use help on this. I'm a fair builder, and a better avatar maker...but this level of scripting is beyond me. And I'll need a lot of help with the house battle bots.

Thank you!

Lumi

Just a couple suggestions I thought I'd throw in.

There should be a standard script created that would have to be added to all robots. This would control how much damage the robot would take before shutting down. When it shuts down it could either derez or be automatically moved over to a holding area. That would take away the unfair advantage of letting people code their own damage scripts.

[edit]Noticed you already did mention classes.[/edit]

For the different classes you could have restrictions on functionality like light, medium and heavy robots. And alter the damage control scripts as such. The robots should be reviewed by judges and they would figure out which category the robot should be in.

Hope that sparks some ideas.

Thanks, Derek, that's good food for thought. I hadn't even thought of damage points, I was thinking in terms of flipping the bot over or pushing it out of bounds as happens on the Robot Wars TV show (I've only seen the British version)

Lumi

I've only seen a couple and a lot of the times the robots have weapons on them and some actually drill or hammer through the other robot and make it smoke and die. That's why I thought about damage points.

But you're right I've seen them flip over and be pushed into pits and that.

Darek,

But damage is an interesting idea...would be really cool to work out a way to create something that would disable something else's scripts too...create conditions under which an opponent could no longer function. Perhaps encase it inside of a large prim or whatnot.

I think the possibilites are quite far reaching.

As creative as people in Secondlife are, I can't wait to see what might happen.

Lumi

First of all, thank you for changing into Dr Zaeus, Lumiere

Second of all, instead of Robot or Junk Wars...
what about Mech Wars? Mechwarrior/Battletech style. Giant freakin ROBOTS! hehe

FYI, the only reason I ever use physics in any of my bots or droids is smooth motion for flight. When the fighting starts I always turn physics off, which prevents a host of problems that you really have little to no control over, particularly rapid physical collisions/ensuing lag/sim instability. I'll revisit when Havok 2 comes around.

Collisions work fine in non physical objects. Just keep track of HP internally. I use display meters and counters to visually show status (which also makes cheating evident).

The Terrain game (for however much longer it will be around) uses fighting/marching/flying bots extensively. You want to see it, come to Game Dev 2 if I'm on. The multi bot fights are pretty fun to watch.

I'd love to see that Tcoz!

Thank you...hope I'm not stepping on any toes with this!

Lumi

i had a robot idea a few weeks back but shelved it because of other projects & obligations.

I know two of the UK robot wars judges quite well, and will be co-presenting with them at next week's Robofesta Conference in Miton Keynes. I even have links (more tenuous) with Mentorn who have the UK rights to the name Robot Wars; sadly in the States this is more a grey area, and I think the currently accepted name is Battlebots.

I would love to show Noel and Martin any mock ups you might have of robots. In fact, some pictures of robot AVs would be welcome as well. Credit will be given.

I'm presenting on work I have done with real robot projects for children with special needs, but wanted to end on the use of SL and robot sims, so your idea is really topical.

Post pictures here or IM me in game

I want IN!
THis is a GREAT idea and I think could go a long way toward creating some very cool content.

There could even be an entry fee, with a tiered break down of the purse at each of the levels of competition, and the house skimming 10% for upgrades, maintenance and T/E (Time and effort), so the breakdown would look like this: 1st place: 50% of the purse...2nd place 25%, 3rd place 15%, House 10%.

One question I have always found to be interesting when dealing with these types of 'bots...
Would their control be Remote, or AI?

I know that I could write a 'bot to go either way, but I am not sure that an AI bot could win against a R/C 'bot controlled by a Human; I don't think I can get the scripts to run fast enough, especially with the new changes in 1.7.

For the damage points i know that Cubey Terra made a damage system that would be usuable for inspiration.

For the flipping all you need (i think) is to make a sensory event and check for the mother prims rotational value. Each time it triggers it will do x + 1, when x is 5 the bot dies x starts as 0 and after some time, lets say 6 sec, the bot dies. Why? Because a bot is normaly able to get up after being pushed over, its called a schrimech (cant... spell... that... word).

In normal language the script would look like:

life = 100
If(hit by bullet type 10) then life - 10
lltext the life points every 0.1s

if life = 0 then move/die

at least i think. I might even be able to script it =o it would though, require the bullets to ahve specific names and the scripts to be defined, but normaly thats ok. You build the bot and insert the script, viola battle bot

I probably wont come back to this thread,b ut you're welcome to IM me ingame

Although my combat system would be easily modable for this, in its current form it only works if an avatar is sitting on the object in question.

Consider that direct bot-a-bot grappling is not the only possible goal-oriented scenario.

You might set it up so that the battling bots have to move a ball into the opponent's "net" or something similar. This would also work with more-than-two bots (each gets his own net, etc).

This is a great Idea! Although im not a good scripter Im a pretty fair builder (when I can be bitherd and this definetely grabbed my attention) Also Im good at organizing stuff. Id love to help out with coming up with ideas or constructing the arena/house bots. Ill PM you when I get home (im on the work computer the now).

Yet another 'how to score/win' scenario:

The 'sumo' model - if for whatever reason a 'bot leaves a prescribed area (or is 'pushed' off - think of the arena in that case being a raised platform of some sort) then it loses a point/takes damage/is defeated (season to taste).

I like this whole general 'Robot Wars in SL' idea a great deal - not only as a creative outlet for those so inclined, but also a very good candidate for what could become a popular SL 'spectator sport' - which IMO is in itself is a Good Thing (tm) for a great number of reasons.

Have fun!

- Tengu Yamabushi

*gets big mug of coffee and orders a few pizzas*

I'll be back to you in a week

Chaos 2 will die by my virtual flipper

nice .. interesting to see that someone has the same ideas as me..
wonder how far you are into building this..

I have my scripts rough coded out and a basic arean a built..
have to sim out my scripts a bit more and then figure out how to sell them to plug into bots without revealing thier secrets..

then sell the tickets!

There was a computer game version of robotWars - it was proudly on display at about 30 consoles during the filming of the last (ever?) series of TechnoGames, while I was on set with the producers. I think that we might need to consider a default set of scripts with listens to accomplish some of the 'actions'.

For example, the flip is a simple animation, but we would need to 'know' that the opponent was in a certain position to fairly simulate the flipping. I think that scripts would have to be checked by a referee for conforming to a set of guidelines, but that they should be 'secret' from other participants. Autonomous robots would be the best; they had an autonomous league in America for the Real RW contests, but even then they were rare. We should do better with the special knowledge that a sim can provide; don't have to worry about tedious vision recognition, etc. Of course, part of the challenge in SL shoudl be good controller coding as well, so remote operated should also be allowed; we could attach camera to the robot to allow in robot vision and have a HUD in the mouselook for example.

We might also want guidelines on what size, weapons, etc can be used, and to have classifications; newbies v script widows might be unfair. Also, what do people think about buying your robot, rather than making it yourself?

Doc

P.S Looking forward to any pics that people can provide.

Hmm...

I've been scratching my head and having a think, and there's a few more things I think we'd have a problem with.

I think it'd be a bad idea if the bots had health and their weapons did damage. Simply because of how easy it is to make your weapon just that little bit more powerful or they've got just that little bit more health than you. I understand this could be a script shared between bots but it wouldn't be hard to write some sort of hack for it. Plus where's the fun in using middleware?

Pushing another robot around might have to be the way to do it, but it only takes someone who doesn't like losing to stick a few zero's on the end of a few numbers and their bot isn't moving anywhere. Plus there's always good old llPushObject to make sure you win the match in 5 seconds.

Now I think about it, maybe there should be a restriction to 2 prim bots aswell to help keep Havok from having a breakdown.

God I dunno... maybe I should just stop thinking about it and just start making the damn robot.

the pushing balls into goals idea seems good, it force to interact with a non controlled element (the balls) regardless of how the robot is built. add to the arena a stanadardised number of "beacons" so the robots have some kind of grid or lines to drive theyr autonomous move and you have something quite interesting.

you could have categories for this:

pure physical bots : bots have to be physic all the time and can only push the balls by physical methods (we could stay a bit laxist by saying they can "hold" a ball that is into them, i am not sure)

non physical bots: these bots must NEVER be physic and thus use the push abilitiies to manipulate the balls (wich can be very interesting for math nerds)

mixed bots: free for all , almost. the bots can phase in and out of physic, use projectiles or push if needed to put the balls in the goal

remote bots: you couldnt modify a bot prepared for you, but all you skill reside in building its piloting program (that will be out of the robot)

sumobots physical: a circular arena is drawn with a beacon at its middle for the robots to "see" the circle and the goal is to push the other robot out of the circle

tower builders: these robots can be physical or not, itsnot realy important, but they have to lift cubes to build a tower of physical cubes.

thats my ideas for now

Deevyde Maelstrom has a working battle-bot construction kit availible at his place in Afton, you might want to check that out.

I'm in if you can get it working

Feel free to IM me when it's ready.

Azelda