Just letting you guys know about our robots game. Similar to Spore and Lego Mindstorms, with a bit of MineCraft. Hope you guys like where we are taking this.


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Rawbots.net

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Rawbots is our attempt to bring robotics to the masses and make it fun. Fun as in gameplay fun, not as an implicating that robotics ain't fun
Developing this game is extremely complex and a human designer cannot possibly design for all possible outcomes. Without managing complexity, there is no way we could have gotten this far.

Graph-based development is our way to approach complexity in a manageable way. By modeling every major system of the game, we can find holes and ambiguities, build solvers and create tests to analyze the correctness of the design.

We can model all kinds of scenarios, from knowledge and AI, to story and gameplay, to UI and gestures. And graph theory provides the foundation on which we build our codebase. By leveraging years of graph theory research we can create very concise and correct code that can handle complexity beyond human manageability. Offsetting the costs of game design comprehension to graph algorithms.

The graph is powered by a signal-based framework. Everything produces something that can be consumed by something else. You will find oscillators, PID controllers, sensors and all kinds of game objects that produce and consume. Even the core building blocks produce and consume connections.
With this, everything extrapolates to a powerful robotics system that is truly customizable.

The fun part is mainly accomplished by configuring the physics engine to be unrealistic but 100% consistent. We have customizable gravity fields for flat land and planets/asteroids. We have state of the art IK controllers, literally from papers just published. And several more research controllers in development. All this adds to a comic physics system but fully predictable. Essential for world/bot building and emergent gameplay.

There is lots more to add: everything is a controller, world building, scavenging, planet/galaxy creation and conquering, etc. I'll be back.

This looks like a lot of fun!

Everybody is doing it. We have to too.


Steam Greenlight:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92987433

Everything in the video is generated, no canned animations. Its signal-based with oscillators, and other type of controllers.
In these videos you can see how far we got with walkers:

Horse-like:



spider-like:


biped-like:



We haven't been able to get walkers to be as efficient as other types of machines, and they didn't look cool. Thats why they didnt make the video.

"`I wonder what makes us build inefficiently-shaped human robots instead of nice streamlined machines?'
`Pride, sir,' said the robot."
Terry Pratchett (The Dark Side of the Sun)


But these segway-like things work surprisingly well, staying up with PID controllers:


So we haven't invented anything here. But we are proud of the single most important contribution we are making... which is to make accessible and fun, all these complex constructs.

Thought you might want to see some new artwork and videos:


New planet system:


Explorers:



Lights


Bots falling in water:



Full gallery is here:
http://www.rawbots.net/gallery/

We just added a float machine for creating water floating bots: