Interesting to both points

The first would be nifty, if you could give the generals, ect. specific orders. (ie. you wouldn't every give troops orders, you'd probably get at most 2 layers down in your order giving.)

The second is nice, tho its implementation based.

For egsample, how many different states would there be, and what would cause them?

A difficult problem... ("No, i told you to blow up the side door when the person ducks, rolls, and belly-dances!")

From,
Nice coder

I'm working on a little poc program atm.

"Change the colour to red"

Will change the text colour to red. (still working on the lut system tho. Just started)

"Change the text to "This is a test""
Works tho.

Jsut a simple poc program, but the problems i'm facing are interesting.

From,
Nice coder

sounds like an awsome idea.

You could test it without actually using bots in a 3d environment. You could use a chatbot, and just have it tell you what it does. or somethingl ike that. To see what it would think when you command it.

This reminds me a lot of the famous block world program SHRDLU from the 1970s. If you haven't read anything about it, it's really worth checking out the example dialog.

http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/shrdlu/

Seems nice.

I can't wait for Shurdlu++ tho...

From,
Nice coder

Would resoning be needed for droids?

If so, then how much do you think they would need.

From,
NIce coder

by running it's strategy and tactics subroutines, of course!

hmmm. i was thinking along the lines of "x112 filled x117. x117 is a friend therefore x112 is an enemy." before blowing x112 to smitherines.

as well as
x112 is 2m away from me.
my missle kills anything within a 5m radious.
if i hit x112, i will be killed.
therefore i need to hit something within 5m of x112 but more then 5m from me.
the wall furfills these criteria.
therefore i aim for the wall.

from,
Nice coder

I'd be impressed to see something so generalised that it could figure out something like that!

Regarding states (sorry I took a while to get back to you) :

An actor would have a number of states. A door might have { open , closed }but it might equally have { open, closed, opening, closing, blocked } or more.

You need to design your objects so that you can query their states. You might want functionality along the lines of:

listStates();
registerListener(action, listener);

Then when I say "When bob belly dances across the sand pit" the agent you are giving the order to can go:

1. What states does bob have?
2. Which one most closely matches "belly dancing"?
3. Where is the object called sand pit?
optional 4. Is there a "move across" state in sand pit.

so the pseudoish-code would go something like

States = bob.listStates();
Find in States "Belly Dance"
bob.registerListener("Belly Dance", this);