After 4 years studying programming I can finally play Carnage Heart. For those of you who don''t know what carnage heart is, it''s a ps1 game where you get mechs called OKE''s and write them AI programs to beat up your oponent. It didn''t do very well I don''t think because the programming wasn''t exactly easy. Any way I want to do a kind of MMO game with this idea. But hopefully with a better language amd stuff. Should be fun

About a year ago, I was researching AI in a recreational context, and I came across some esoteric competition, where programmers wrote behavioral systems for these little bug-like characters, which would then fight in an arena. The rules were simple, and the bugs were identical. I think they had missiles and shields, and could move around the arena in a few different ways, and they had some rudimentary sensors for finding opponents and detecting threats.

I can''t find the lousy site, now, but there are some similar things going on. No doubt you have a more intimate knowledge of the field than I do.

Anyway, I advise you to go with something fairly simple, so that the AI is the focus, not the weapon loadout or armor balance. The player should be more concerned with cultivating an effective behavior than selecting an effective arsenal or building an invincible juggernaut.

A minimum of modifyable equipment, maybe a fixed system of paper/rock/scissors style gear. I always thought it would be neat to see a showcase of AI pilots for Exobattle, the old open-source space fighter from Matt Burch. The "bots" in that game were dumb as bricks, but the ships had a great, simple balance to them. I''m not sure if the game is still around, and it''s Mac-only anyhow, so I''ll try to describe it for you.

Ships:

Simple triangular fighters (Based on the "Manta" from Escape Velocity) with two engines mounted on the back and maneuvering capabilities that were independent of other motion (you could shut down the engines and just pivot in space like a turret). Shutting off the engines caused you to decelerate until you stopped.

Defense:

You only had one shield, and it was depleted no matter where you were hit. It would regenerate over time.

Your hull was pretty tough, but as it was damaged, your systems could start to fail. Targetting, weapons, radar and engines could all be harmed, affecting the ship''s performance.

Offense:

You had four seeker missiles. Missiles were faster than ships could go, but you could still see them coming, and they were less maneuverable, so you had a good chance of dodging them, though they would dog you until they self-destructed (maybe twenty seconds). Simple missile AI. Just flew at top speed and continually corrected course to be pointed at you. If you flew by them, they''d pull a 180. They did a good chunk of damage to the hull, but if your shields were full, one missile wouldn''t penetrate them.

Laser cannons regenerated, making them infinite but requiring a pilot to pace himself. As the power level decreased, so did the firing rate. Did a lot of harm to the shield, but barely hurt the hull.

Your Mass Driver cannon had forty rounds, and did prodigious damage to the hull, though the shield blocked it handily. A good firing rate made it devastating at close range, but the shells only travelled a little ways. I never understood that, but there you have it.

The Arena:

There was a space station, where served as the spawn point, and if you came to a full stop in the bay, it would recharge your shield, reload your missiles and mass driver, and repair your hull. You are invincible in the station, and your weapons don''t function.

A planetoid floated nearby, complete with an atmosphere and gravity. If you entered the atmosphere, your flight controls changed to be more airplane-ish, and you had to be careful not to hit the ground.

Asteroids surrounded the station for a little ways, providing some cover and more danger. The spun lazily, but never really moved.

Other than those three features, it was just void space as far as you cared to fly.

Okay, that''s the structure of the game. It''s pretty simple, all things considered. But the gameplay was quite deep and engaging. The net code was a little weak, which made it hard to get more than two or three players in at once, but you can no doubt clean that up for the MMO game you''re discussing.

You could just run in, designate a target, and let loose with your missiles, but they tend to dodge them, and even a good hit is no guarantee of damage, much less victory. The most effective method was to hit them with the laser until you see sparks coming off the hull (indicating that the shields are depleted) and then cut loose with the mass driver, and maybe a missile if they start to get away. I tended to use missiles to discourage pursuers, since avoiding one takes a few seconds of tumbling and weaving.

The variety of available styles, combined with the simplicity of the controls, would make a good prototype for what I perceive your idea to be. A relatively small number of individual commands, which can be strung together into any number of behavioral patterns, could result in millions of different piloting styles. You could take into account system damage, heading back to the station when propulsion systems are disabled or just making a stand and racking up as many points as possible before you buy a farm. You could camp behind the station, scanning for injured ships on the retreat, and harvest them as they try to restore their systems. A shipe might lure a pusuer into the planet''s atmosphere, gambling that its AI isn''t set up to handle the gravity and altered controls, letting it crash on its own and saving some ammo.

Of course, you could make changes to the system. If you make the missiles a little less reliable, the asteroids could be a refuge, forcing a stronger opponent to use dumb-fire weapons. Missile AI could itself be modifyable, leading to more cunning or less discriminate missiles. In that context, the programming could itself be a gameplay factor. More guidance in a missile means less explosive payload, so dumb-fire rockets would be apocalyptically powerful, while super-smart ones would hit more frequently and do far less damage.

As the first to respond, I hope I didn''t totally misinterpret your aims here.

One of the most successful and venerable examples of this niche was a Macintosh game named RoboWar. It's recently been ported to Windows, sort of: visit here

[edited by - Tisephone on October 28, 2003 7:36:35 PM]

I was thinking about this a lot more over the last few days.

In the ps1 game there are a number of fixed if statements, that referred to things like ammo, there was a chance thing, damage, heat, counters, simple radio signals and various scanning deals. Some of your options were a small bit limited, for one thing you couldn''t do more than one thing at once.

I''d like to continue the whole graphical element I think but also have the text version of programs.