I'd probably be helping on this if I wasn't laden with a ton of schoolwork.....
Anwyay, you should get some concave arenas as well - give the strategy some depth instead of point 'n shoot. With obstacles you can get hiding behaviour, and wall guarding. It also minimizes SnS victories (Sit 'n spinners) which just spin in circles, stop when they see an enemy and shoot.
The goal of the game, imho, should be to promote complex strategy, rather than tricks around the engine as has occured in other robot games (there's this one where if you use a certain movement command you can rotate while still moving, setting you up for the next movement - basically very agile bots). The right screenshot looks very similar to that game actually, although 3d rather than 2d. Some very simple physics could also be implemented for hover wars.
Output stuff will depend on methods. You could have a modular weapon system (I suggest this for stratagy variation), or a universal weapon (most do this). Same for sensors, but there is even more variation on top of this. You could have queries to teh sensors that immediatly returns results. This is probably most natural to a programmer, but in order to make it more realistic, and make scans more sparse, the sensor should be oriented or range set and on the next frame or even longer recieve results. Either a callback or a query.
Modular Weapons example:
Rocker=CreateRocketLauncher(0,0) ;creation - slot 0, oriented forward
Fire(Rocker)
Mgun=CreateMachineGun(2,1) ;creation - slot 2, oriented right
Fire(Mgun)
Modular Sensors Example:
Sonar=CreateSonar(1,0) ;creation - slot 1, forward
Ping(Sonar)
Print Query(Sonar) ;Returns the distance from last frame
Creation commands can only be used in the beginning.
Oh, and here's how I prefer my driving:
LeftMotor(blah)
RightMotor(blah) ;blah=-100 to 100
Quick, concise and to the point. It can perform any stuff using this (and more because of curves) than could be achieved with all that Move/rotate crap.
Anwyay, you should get some concave arenas as well - give the strategy some depth instead of point 'n shoot. With obstacles you can get hiding behaviour, and wall guarding. It also minimizes SnS victories (Sit 'n spinners) which just spin in circles, stop when they see an enemy and shoot.
The goal of the game, imho, should be to promote complex strategy, rather than tricks around the engine as has occured in other robot games (there's this one where if you use a certain movement command you can rotate while still moving, setting you up for the next movement - basically very agile bots). The right screenshot looks very similar to that game actually, although 3d rather than 2d. Some very simple physics could also be implemented for hover wars.
Output stuff will depend on methods. You could have a modular weapon system (I suggest this for stratagy variation), or a universal weapon (most do this). Same for sensors, but there is even more variation on top of this. You could have queries to teh sensors that immediatly returns results. This is probably most natural to a programmer, but in order to make it more realistic, and make scans more sparse, the sensor should be oriented or range set and on the next frame or even longer recieve results. Either a callback or a query.
Modular Weapons example:
Rocker=CreateRocketLauncher(0,0) ;creation - slot 0, oriented forward
Fire(Rocker)
Mgun=CreateMachineGun(2,1) ;creation - slot 2, oriented right
Fire(Mgun)
Modular Sensors Example:
Sonar=CreateSonar(1,0) ;creation - slot 1, forward
Ping(Sonar)
Print Query(Sonar) ;Returns the distance from last frame
Creation commands can only be used in the beginning.
Oh, and here's how I prefer my driving:
LeftMotor(blah)
RightMotor(blah) ;blah=-100 to 100
Quick, concise and to the point. It can perform any stuff using this (and more because of curves) than could be achieved with all that Move/rotate crap.