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Autonauts

Make and teach robots to automate the world! · By Denki

Teaching Complexity

A topic by TopsFTW created Aug 20, 2017 Views: 473 Replies: 1
Viewing posts 1 to 2

As a software engineer, I really enjoy this game. It's a lot of fun to just program little robos to do the work for you. But the one thing that bothers me that it's a whole lot of work to train your workers.
It's not a very flexible system. I'll conclude this post with an idea on how to solve these problems.

For instance, it's twice the work to get two bots to do the same task.

I noticed this first with woodcutting. I have 4 workers in the tree harvesting process.
1 digs holes until hands are empty, then changes inventory item until hands are empty, then collects new shovels from storage. 1 collects seeds and plants new trees in those holes.
1 chops down the trees until hands are empty, then changes inventory item until hands are empty, then collects new axes from storage. And 1 collects the logs and deposits them in storage.

Adding more workers to the digging and chopping processes costs an enormous amount of clicks and it's duplicate work.

It's also hard to move a certain set of instructions from one worker to another.

In the production side of things, I'm doing a lot of experimenting with where to segment the production and how many saws/desks to use in each product. But I can't just move code over between bots. I have to remove the code from one bot, line by line in a worst case scenario, and re-teach the other bot the entire sequence again.

Both of these problems could be solved by implementing code block templates. Allowing the player to create custom templates of code blocks they've taught their bots which can be accessed and inserted in other bots. Any changes made after insertion would be local and not affect the template. It's purely so that blocks of instructions can be stored and transfered.

It's just a thought, but maybe one that you like. Thank you for your time.

Developer

Thanks so much for your thoughts and ideas.

Yep it's true the current system isn't very flexible and can be time consuming. We'll be addressing this as we go but we're taking small steps with the scripting because one thing we're very aware of is not everyone wants to be a programmer, though I wish they would :)  So we need to make sure the base system can be used for all situations without getting too complex. That said we have a lot of demand for ideas like your suggesting so we need to make sure these features are available, but not required. Hopefully you'll see this development unfold in future releases.

Thanks!