Author Topic: 10 Free Bot Ideas  (Read 2661 times)

Offline EricL

  • Administrator
  • Bot God
  • *****
  • Posts: 2266
    • View Profile
10 Free Bot Ideas
« on: April 17, 2008, 11:35:28 PM »
Here's 10 bot strategies I would love to impliment but realisticly will never get the time to do so, so I'm giving away the ideas.  Some of these could turn an otherwise only okay bot into a game changer.

1) A shape scraper.  Non shape-aware bots end up getting stuck up against shapes.  A shape-aware bot could navigate along shape edges, round and round, picking off unsuspecting bots.

2) A bot that waits and hides around shape corners and ambushes other bots.   Vision is very precise for shapes, particularly up close.  It should not be difficult for a bot to figure out where exactly a shape corner is and where to linger so that it's focus eye is looking just pass the corner.  Should give it a cycle or two jump on an unsuspecting bot that comes around the corner.    

3) A bot that hides in shapes, pokes it's head out and uses the shape as a sheild.  Shape edges are soft.  A bot that constantly thrusts backward into a shape will be partially or completly embedded in the shape, depending on how hard it thrusts.  Controlling the thrust would allow a bot to poek it's head up occasionally, shoot with only a minimal amout of it's body exposed, etc.  

4) A torridal field edge jumper.  A bot that hangs out near field edges or corners, jumpts back and forth and uses the jumps to escape preditors or surprise prey.

5) The eye stalk bot.  Create a tiny offspring and tie to it.  Wait until the tie hardens and then use it to increase your eye sight range.   Your eye stalk can pass you back it's eye values via the .tin/tout pairs.  You can fix yourself to avoid recoil and suddenly extend your eyesight stalk by changing the tie length, pushing your eye stalk into their proximity suddenly, surprising hard to catch prey.  You could even flush them towards you by pushing the lure to the other side of them.  Multiple eye stalks could be used as pickets, extended in multiple directions.

6) The lure bot.  Use an eye stalk as above as a lure in combination with 2 or 3 above.  With #2, it will let you peek aroudn the corner.   The prey or preditor won't be able to see you if you keep it between you and them (but you can see him via the passed back eye values from your lure).   If you make the lure have really small body and wave it around a little, it will be super hard to hit with shots.

7) The sword master.  Use a lure as a sword.  Wave it around your enemy, keeping it closer to him than you are.  Push it past him to the other side, make him turn his back on you.   Lots of bots are programmed to go after the nearest bot.  You can keep him distracted by keeping the lure right against or even inside him while you shoot from a distance, using telemetry fed back from your lure.  If your sword hits him, if will trigger his refvars even if he isn't looking at it with his focus eye.  Or, you coudl shoot from your sword.  Thurst it into him suddenly, shoot at point blank range, then withdraw, again and again.  Good luck tracking that...

8) Walking through walls.  It should be possible to push a lure through a thin shape such as a maze wall, then fix the lure and pull your self through be changing the tie length.

9) Use cascading lures for really long distance reconisense.

10) Use a disconnected lure as a reconisense drone in combination with #4 to scout out what's on the other side of the field edge.  The lure jumps there, then jumps back and releys what it saw.  

Many beers....

Offline Moonfisher

  • Bot Overlord
  • ****
  • Posts: 592
    • View Profile
10 Free Bot Ideas
« Reply #1 on: May 01, 2008, 10:07:37 AM »
Heh I had the same idea as #5, using small bots to increase eye range... but never got around to it.
If I'm going to build a new bot my plan is to breed with the alge and cooperate with them, surounding the alge with around 6 bots, creating a larger bot with an alge in the middle... maybe keep the alge realy small to make sure it isn't vulnerable if a bot is killed and to make room for it to reproduce.
Anyway the point is to have a multibot that doesn't need food, just kills things and grows larger as more alge are formed inside it.
The more bots it consists of the stronger it's firepower will be, and if it spawn some small bots to create a cloud around it or uses an eye stalk for each bot combining your ideas (5 and 7), or both... it should be able to keep the "mothership" safe while the cloud of tie bots around it take care of the killing.
Basicaly it would reap the benefits of the alge energy gain while being able to spread as much as it wants to.