Any word on the status of Deliverator?

-tm

Yea its borked.

Deliverator Embeds Lisp In Vendetta Enabling Rule-based Abstraction To Order Reality

or, if you prefer,

Do Electric Leeches Imagine Virtual Ewes Ravenously Awaiting The Otter Revolution?

Deliverator is the name of a Lisp process that receives game events from the various sectors. These trigger the evaluation of rules using a RETE network. The rules (and various helper functions) message the sectors to do things (mostly control bots). It has been in operation since the Hive first made its appearance, and, for the most part, it's running fine. It's running right now; controlling the Hive's expansion and retreat; telling the bots who to defend and when to repair.

As of yesterday, the production Deliverator is also controlling the Hive Hunt missions and determining their availability. It's a complex job. The mission is to clear a sector. The sector could be upgraded or cleared by someone else before you get there. There are also issues due to the fact that the station menu contents are sent to the player when they enter the station and not updated after that. Today I added a check that will inform you if you take a mission that shouldn't have been available and end it for you with no penalty (making them available only when they should be is going to be harder).

Deliverator can also launch and direct trade convoys, but, as we found out last night, it isn't yet up to the job of maintaining the number we launched. There were some other problems with the convoys which may be related to Deliverator falling behind, or may be a bug we haven't found yet. After more testing of small numbers of convoys on the test server (with no problems), I started one in Dau (I don't have the sectors handy) which leaves every 10 minutes, and which appears to be doing fine.

I hope this answers your questions. I have high hopes that the layer of abstraction Deliverator provides will allow us to implement very complex and interdependent behaviors without the code becoming unmaintainable as most large, tightly-coupled programs do. Of course, no programming paradigm yet devised can guarantee a bug free program. :)

Wow. Thanks for the very informative response. Thanks for the work too! We do appreciate it!

-tm

Just a question: Will convoys be able to easily get through ion storms?

I got your reference, Momerath.
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

Now go get some sleep.

[EDITED. Thanks Broma. I can always count on you to keep me correct! :) ]

Androids, Lebermac. Androids.

I'd just like to take a (somewhat delayed (/me curses sickness...)) moment to say how much I like the new Hivebot AI. It's like they die when I shoot at them now! :P

However, one thought that just occured to me was that, just as AI shouldn't be able to dodge everything, they shouldn't always have perfect aim (and I'm not talking about problems with them leading their shots -- that's fine by me. :P ), and some of their shots should go wild. I imagine that this could be accomplished simply by giving weapons inaccuracies...hum

Speaking of inaccuracies...we don't have much of that in terms of weaponry, do we? Sans the Popcorn gun, but meh. I'll post a topic on that when I get a chance.

It'd be nice if Hive bots didn't insta-respawn...

The Hive bots that are part of the Sedina Hive (which is what all Hive bots will eventually be like) do NOT insta-respawn. Each bot type in each Hive territory-type respawns after a set number of minutes. The shortest respawn timer is currently 2 minutes.

Our intention is to place time and material costs on building of different bot-types and to have the Hive actually build them using materials it gathers with each Queen working on one at a time. A lot of what we need to do this is now in place, but there are other things we can add in the near-term that we feel will provide more fun, so it's on the back burner right now.

I'd also like to see more errors and higher inaccuracy factor with the bots.

But then again, would a robotic and a.i.-controlled construct such as a Hive bot really have any error margins? Since even their combat behaviour is a result of controlled and procedurial mathematical calculations, isn't it possibly they simply cannot make that kind of error, even if they can be tricked, outwitted and outflown?

Ion,
There will always be a margin of error because they simply cannot predict where you might be.
If the speeds on the energy weapons got boosted up then they probably COULD hit you 100% of the time.
But yea.....

15 or so Behemoths leaving Latos N-2


Warping Out


Queueing up to dock




Nice.

Wow...

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Absolutely gorgeous...

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Time to Pirate.

I have noticed some docking errors on the part of the bot moths. I Thought I saw a moth squash its escort agenst a station resulting in action by the SF. Perhaps bots should be unable to get a KOS. Also another suggestion perhaps the comvoys could be run on a seperate system that has direct network acess to the server.

thanks for the patch! everything is workin fine so far, missions that is...

Is it intentional that the Deliverator-style traders don't answer Hail? I like to keep track of what the NPC traders do in case they suddenly do something profitable :D

Semi-intentional; the devs know that code hasn't been transferred over to the new bots yet, I'm pretty sure they do plan to, they just haven't yet.

Did you IA guys forget to pay your hosting bill? I'm timing out when trying to view the "awesome" pictures.

PS: Has anybody elsebeen experiencing intermittent connection problems to google today?

IA seems to be doing fine. I've had no issues today.

Also, no probs with google...

sounds like your end.

kp