Yes. In fact, if you're comfortable with web programming in general (PHP/ASP.NET, setting up servers, etc.) I have a grand master plan involving a virtual private server that would make for an interesting project. Though that would be less about programming and more about setting up a web server, so I don't know how appropriate that would be for your project.
The first one (program automatically knowing when new versions are available) is something you could set up for the current program, even. I'm not sure how big of a project it would be, though. The hard part would be potentially updating shortcuts once a new version is downloaded. Or maybe you could write a program that automatically chooses the most recent version and runs that, and then all that would be required is an automatic restart of the current program.
As far as having the program let you download bots directly from the bestiary, the hard part is setting up a web interface for users to add their bots. The basic work flow I'd like is for users to write a bot and go to a certain page in a bestiary site to upload it. The site would tie in its login to the forum (might not be possible with our current forum software, but I was thinking of switching for DB3 anyway) and wiki, so there would be just one login. The user could even come back and (in a version controlled way similar to the wiki) post new versions of their particular bot. You could set up tags describing the bot you've built.
Then inside the program it browses bots in the bestiary and lets you download them. There isn't enough of DB3 right now to work on some of the integration stuff (I was thinking of something like having bots come with "demo settings", so you can just one-click and get the bot running on your machine to see what it does), but you could certainly set up bestiary browser. If you were to do the web side of things in ASP.NET, you could probably share much of the code between the web site and the actual program. You could even do something simple like hook in to the .NET web browser controls and just web browse to the bestiary maybe.
You wouldn't necessarily need to program this all from scratch. It would probably be better if you didn't, actually, since we could take advantage of upgrades and the like. But I don't know what the requirements for your project are.
Basically I'm being really picky for DB3 stuff, so development would be sort of "agile". You'd present plans and get feedback from me. You'd partially implement them, and I'd play around with them and give feedback, and you'd end up scraping large sections of code and try again as I annoyingly change my mind without any real idea of what I want
There's also a
task list if you want to look over it and see if there's something there you'd rather work on. An error console would be a pretty cool project, too. You could build a base "console" type widget we could use in other places, too, and then use that to build a nice "oops, Darwinbots has crashed, send error report?" widget.
Also, which time zone are you in? I'm in Pacific time.
Sorry for the wall of text
