yes i could make it wait in the station until it's hired, but i was saying i would need to add a time limit if once it was hired it still needed to be told to undock, otherwise it would stay hired and sit in the station waiting for the undock command, even if it's master was long gone.

It can't be fired in the station?

yes it could be "freed", but it couldn't be killed, so if someone hires it, doesn't let it undock, and doesn't free it, it will sit there useless to everyone else.
so the only way to keep it docked is if it undocks as soon as it's hired, or if i impose a time limit on how long vBot can reamain in one persons control

Make it like the RC cars in GTA. It sits in the station until hired, then comes out and flies around until it runs out of cash, prompting at 30 seconds left. When it runs out of cash, it pulls a /explode.

Wheee!! That was fun. Flew the bot from s9 station to s5 station and got it to dock. Okay, so I cheated a little by pushing the bot into the dock. It was nearly impossible trying to get the bot to line up with the dock and stop in time. I wish it would turn in increments of 45 degrees rather than 90. And use an ebrake bind for your stop command. Simply bind a key to brakes and backwards thrust. That'll get it to stop a lot quicker.

Yeah i liked playing with vbot, Lots of fun =)

weeee i got ith trough the race track in 41!!!
only hurt him to orange as well :D

wow silentsuicide. quite a feat. hurray for vbot!

is it possible to make binds that would control my ship + vbot's ship, so that both can fly in sync? given that I'm in a bus too, our velocities should be the same

Wow I'm glad everyone is having fun with vBot, and i'm impressed that silent managed to pilot it through 41, also... vBot has managed to rack up 6 kills, small in comparison to it's 175 deaths, but still impressive :D

so in regards to the 90 degree turns, vBot turns for 1 second, then stops, the fact that that is 90 degrees is coincidental, if someone could tell me how to set it to turn slower, i would gladly give more maneuverability to it.

harvestmouse, the idea of having keys control a players ship as well as vBot was the primary thought when i streamlined the code (which is why there are no messages programmed yet) but alas the BASH script that is vBot, is still very inefficient with what i estimate to be a half second loop, meaning vBot reads commands every half second. (this is why some commands are missed, because if anyone speaks within a half second of a command given the command will not be the last line in the log, and vBot wouldn't see it, i've considered making vBot read the last command given by it's master, but then it wouldn't be able to do the same command twice in a row, so until i figure that out, you may just have to issue commands more than once.)
Now that said you could write some binds to do it, but for it to work as good as possible you would have to limit your controls to that of vBot, meaning you would only be able to turn 90 degrees at a time, and the delay would still be present so you'd have to keep an eye on vBot to make sure it received the command.

Now another issue that i would like input on, some players have been sending vBot into deep space, I hoped people would be respectful of eachother and not do this, because if vBot is in deep space the chances of someone finding it, (even if it was free) are extremely slim. Since vBot is for everyone to enjoy this practice of sending it away isn't very nice, i already changed the code so that when vBot dies it becomes free so that if someone left it without freeing it it was easy to reset it, but other than a time limit (which i don't want to do) the deep space thing can't be avoided.
I could tell vBot to ignore those who have sent it deep in the past, but i would like to hear some other opinions.

-Cam-

perhaps when you hire the bot, it creates a group and invites you to it. So not only would it confirm that you successfully hired it, you could also find it in deep space if you needed.

inviting the player to a group is a possibility, but may not confirm hiring, and if vBot is a million meters away i don't think most players would bother going to find it.

and on a different note i forgot to mention, I have been considering adding a kill command, to make vBot self destruct, and another to actually shut down vBot's script in case something goes wrong (like vBot spamming the chat with commands) the kill command would be harmless enough if only it's master could issue it, (so that wouldn't solve the deep space issue unless the last player had freed it) which is unlikely because vBot is programmed to shut down when it's freed (although it hasn't been working flawlessly)
But like my previously stated shut down code, i could give certain (trustworthy) players the commands to kill, and shut down the bot, incase i'm not around to do so. this would only be useful if one of them was online though.

Well, I have an idea. It's not a very plausible idea, but it's an idea. For the 'go' command, give it a VERY slight turn (say 1 or 2 degrees), so that EVENTUALLY if left alone, it will come in a complete circle. You could make this delayed, after maybe one minute of go time. For your 'go' handler, spawn a new process that is a timer that exits when it reaches 60 seconds, and if that process exits, then start the turn. Your timer could be something like this:

count=0
while [ $count<=60 ];
do sleep 1s;
count=$count+1;
done

I don't know whether I have those semicolons in the right place, but you get the idea.

HTH,

-rc

Alrighty some updates

vBot now turns in 45 degree increments.
and since that would make turning around very annoying i've added a 180 command: "180" easy enough? :D
also the "stop" command now stops everything, guns, turbo, everything, and it applys the brakes to slow down quicker as well. This change has been made based on the logs, since people were using the stop command for all of these things.

red cactus, Your idea may be implemented in the future if necessary, but since the deep space thing hasn't been happening a lot, i'd rather not do it right now because it wouldn't help vBot's already lacking maneuverability, and I realy don't want to code it :D

now the help messages, I think I've figured out how to do them, it's much more complicated now that keystrokes are typed into the game, and i didn't want the same msg to be sent more than once, which would be a problem due to the inefficient code, but yeah, i've got an idea, and will implement it in the next couple of days.

I briefly tested a "frigate killing mode" today with the help of Arolte and it did what i wanted it too, this mode just tells vBot to barrel roll foreward and backwards while shooting, so since the frig is such a big target if vBot is positioned right it should score quite a few hits, this mode has been disabled for now, so don't bother asking Arolte the command, it will come after the help commands are up.

I also experimented with a mode to space the DEF bots, but it failed miserably.

So now i'll ask for your help, if you can write a bind or a sequence of binds that manages to space the DEF bots, vBot could be programmed to do it. that goes for any other binds as well, so if you have one that may be useful let me know :D

Cheers
-Cam-

OH YEAH! I just got Vbot to dock in s9 (repair), go to s5 warp, followed by s13 warp, and docked in the small s13 dock :)... It took a while to get into the s13 station, but I didn't 'bump' him in or anything :)

Vbot is fun. Great creation, good job. I can use him to bring extra cargo now :)

Edit: And to clarify... all that I did all that stuff with 1 vbot :)

Cam Said "this was a big advantage that day vBot had an adv gat, but doesn't do much for the bus gun :D"

Big advantage? I tried to free vbot by using the 'Fire' Command... it almost killed me :P. Stupid Adv Gat.


Any plan on letting us pick the ship Vbot uses? and we pay him for the ship? I would pick a centaur, and make him haul some cargo for me.

Make it read for "vbot destroyed by.." and not let anyone hire it that kills it for a whole day.

Urza, right now vBot only becomes free if it's "freed" by it's master, or if it's destroyed, so punishing someone for "freeing" the bot wouldn't work. Most of the time people get bored with killing it anyways, since it rarely fights back. Some times i'll fight back if i hear the explosions from the other room :D

LOL Monk i saw that and it was quite funny, the amount of people who sit in front of vBot and issue the "fire" command is very high, human psychology is quite intriguing.
as for having it pick a ship:
is it possible? Maybe... while it is possible to program a specific sequence of mouse clicks that would buy the ship, all the parts, group it together and exit the dock, the amount of scrolling in the buy menu makes me cringe just thinking about it.
the most likely scenario i can see for picking a ship would be having it dock in a specific station to pick a cargo ship, another station for a fighter, both ship configs would have to be built ahead of time, and vBot would use the "select ship" menu to get it, which means it would work great for the first couple times, but then the inventories would become mixed and i'd have to fly around and reset it, also i still haven't figured out how to keep vBot in the station, so the idea of players paying for the ships still wouldn't work because if vBot is destroyed before it was hired it would lose the ship without compensation. Feel free to donate money to vBot, as i will probably set up the different ship configs this weekend, centaur, and hog are the 2 ships i will give it, i'll probably have the centaurs in s5 station.

A suggestion was made recently that vBot should have a camera.
this would work by vBot taking screenshots every couple seconds and uploading them to a website.

So I looked into it, and it's possible but...

problem 1: .tga files are not viewable in a browser (at least not my browser :D ) so i would need a way to convert the image before uploading.

problem 2: My ISP only lets me have 300mb transfer per month on the free webspace, and i doubt any other free webspace would be more, this means that if i can get the image down to 1mb in size, it would only be able to be viewed a max of 300 times in a month, and possibly only 150 times if uploading is included in the limit. This would render the idea of a "vBot cam" useless.

so if anyone has any ideas how to solve these problems drop a line in here, because i think the idea is pretty cool, and would like to add it. :D

Put a webserver on your computer and load them directly from there.

OR, even cooler, but harder to implement idea. Get a box with enough CPU power to frame-capture the screen every .5 seconds, and put it in a video stream, something small.