The research for my PSI book is going well, and it's raised a ton of interesting existential questions. But a couple of thousand pages in, it's becoming more and more tedious. The subject matter is of course immensely interesting and different from what I've studied the previous 38 years of my life, but gradually I'm getting more and more interested about the Behind the Scenes. Internet is full of theories and methods, but it's hard to deduce the truth from logic using this limited brain. Fortunately there seems to ways around that.
However, I now need to do something else for some time. Preferably game programming. The game I have in mind is a super-simple AI-programming-competition game. There are plenty of such around, such as those over at The AI Games, Vindinium, CTF-competition and hordes of others, but I'll think I'll build something easier and more fun.
What I'm thinking is a super-ugly 3D tank game based on Trabant (my game prototyping tool), with one dedicated server and a bunch of clients for visualization and team instructions. The best part is that we could play this at work, me and the colleagues. And I will win! :)
Each client will get X number of tanks spread out over somewhat undulated terrain. Each tank can drive(forward,turn) and shoot(angle_xy,type). The number of different types of shots may cause a little bit of strategy; what I'm thinking is that there might be damaging shots, shots that reduce the speed/acceleration and shots that reduce canon range.
The feedback to each client on every "pulse" (not frame, think radar) will be a position and type ("tank" or "shot") for each object. You must then deduce which positions are your tanks, what directions the others are headed, and finally what to do about it.
The canon balls will be fired in a parabola with fixed muzzle velocity, so rudimentary physical knowledge is required. A harder problem will be team movement and how to avoid fired shots.
On the game engine side, I think I'll get away fairly easy as most of what's needed is already included in Trabant. I can create physical 3D tanks very easily, Python has straight-forward socket support (basic UDP will do fine), propagating the game state is not hard, keeping track of logins (oh-my will the colleagues try to cheat!) is very easy and making some type of rounds with statistics for each is also very simple.
Enough already, get to it man!
