Rawbots development restart discussion

[z26]

" What protections against the system being used for illegal activity (money laundering etc)"

As far as I know, just limit the cash flow to an amount thats reasonnable for a gamer to spend.

Nobody will use botcoins for money laundering (given that alternatives like bitcoin exist) if at most you can launder 80$ a month that way.

EDIT: although I guess you could easily set up multiple accounts... sorry im an idiot.

[neil]

Do you have any details on the interaction between Rawbots ingame money (please call them botcoins) and real money?

Haven't fully decided on this, but we will probably be using Bitcoin and possibly Faircoin (if they get their act together). This way, you won't have to worry much about conversion to real money and we can help make that process as painless as possible.

Regarding the architecture, it is too early to comment on this. We will be exploring different options and will keep you guys posted as we get further along.

What plans (if any) are there to pursue getting Rawbots onto Steam?

A steam launch is certainly in the plans.

[MarvinMan]

Also, what is the planned server architecture?

If the current single player performance is anything to go by, I'd assume that multiplayer would have to run as a number of small isolated maps with all the physics done locally.

Perhaps a way to deal with converting in-game currency back to real money would be to restrict pay outs to official competitions or blueprint sales and not make the every day currency redeemable.

What are the things people are most looking forward to being improved/implemented as development progresses? I'm looking forward to seeing if the new physics engine makes things less wobbly.

[tob.s]

Nice to see Rawbots isnt dead, but despite hoping for the best i have some doubts.
ive been quiet for a long time, checking this forum every now and them, some might renember me though as i uploaded bots, tutorials and acl fights on youtube back in the good old days when xfm came out. (

) then i stopped as i had less time and the game seemed dead until i stumbled across this place.

That ingame blueprint shop doesnt make any sense to me, of course players that arent into programming might wanna spend money on some cool advanced bots, but there are a lot of problems involved with this. How could one protect his Ideas - what keeps others from copyiing your bot/code with little difference ? What about using a bought bot as base for your own bot and then selling this one ? Who will investigate such cases, what about legal stuff ? Reminds me of the trouble with payed Skyrim mods, they tried two times and it ended up in a mess. Only way to solve this i can think off is to make bought bots uneditable - u can spawn and steer em but u cant see the code or add/remove parts.

How will one know if the bots realy work ? Can u test em before u buy ( again what keeps u from copying then ), can u get a refound - who decides if the bot works as it should or not ? A reputation system alone cant solve this, demo videos can easily be faked.

If a bought bot uses bought cosmetic parts, will u have to buy them too or will the be replaced by some free parts ?

But most of all buying a blueprint is useless ( atleast in arena fights like acl ) - there soon will be a few bots that will dominate the fights, and if u take luck and arena conditions aside its very likely that bot "1" will always win against bot "2" which though might win against bot "3" which defeats bot "1" - so why would one buy one of this bots when u already know how the fights end up ? So u buy a set of bots and the fight like paper stone scissors ? Or worse, theres one super bot that domiantes all others, best u could do is to buy the same bot an wish for luck. So one will need to tweak and adjust his bot to win against the same model, which leads back to the "copyright" questions.

In an ACL like scenario i realy doubt such a shop would succed - however when the game gets to a point where u have a team of bots things change as one might buy bots for specific tasks so he can concentrate building for other tasks or even just have his individual combination of bought bots. But that would be a whole differnt game from what we have now.

Also it surprises me to see mr rozgo back in the team, i might have missed parts of the story but the last things i red was his partner having some serve accusations and even sueing him , any news about this ?



 

[MarvinMan]

I think any potential blueprint store or design/programming contracts would be better using a system not directly related to any currency, either real or in-game. Using likes/downloads/rating to award more community focused rewards would be better, like an official 'Master Builder' title or small in-game customisation items. There could also be regular prizes for the creators of the most popular/highest rated blueprints rather than having a fixed payment for every download.

[tob.s]

well if its just sharing bots they could simply use the steam workshop. To me the whole idea of a Blueprint store is to earn cash with the communitys creations. Seeing that there was no information about planned gameplay features / changes ( besides from switching to ue and vague multiplayer, there was no word about how the game would actualy work - sandbox ? - arena fights ? - rts like...? ) but already a nice jpeg describing the ingame shop, to me it seems like the devs have set their prioritys on money making. Especialy after what happened i think this is a very disappointing comeback and a wrong signal to the community.

Selling cosmetic Items or even small advantages like exp boosts is ok, if u enjoy the game its a good way to have a little extra fun while supporting the devs. But when it comes to communities creations or mods, the people already push sales by posting their creations ( think of besiege, they never had to do any marketing and had a huge hype ),  so using those people who put so much heart and effort into the game to make some extra money feels wrong to me.

Btw Some months ago a DCS ( flightsim ) -modder tried to make his texture-mod official and sell it in the developers store but failed soon after the first mods were sold, not because noone would buy it ( he made more than 1000$ in pre sales ) but they had huge problems, the drm didnt work, some people had grafic issues, etc - Turned out that one modder alone can hardly fullfill the quality standards of a commercial software ( one modder most likely cant test multiple different hardware/os combinations, one person can hardly offer technical support to 1000s off costumers and the games-devs are busy on their own projects, so they cant offer much help ) So while a mod can be great, it can be a poor commercial product at the same time - u cant complain if a mod doesnt work for you, but as sonn as u buyed it..... The Textures were pulled from the store, the modder now simply accepts donations via paypal and i guess he earned more this way - atleast he can contine working on his mod in peace without having to care about support/refounds etc.

What if a sould blueprint doesnt work like its supposed to - can the creator be forced to fix it within a reasonable time ? How will the blueprint be explained / documented,  example: you bought some fancy auto-aiming gun but cant figure out how to add it to your bot - will u get support from the creator ? what if he has no time or simply doesnt respond ? Who will care about all those complains ? Just look at the besiege steam workshop and imagine everytime someone cant figure out how something works you get an email...

As the problems with such a shop are as obvoius as endless ( atleast if the devs care about the blueprint customers rights ) i realy have my doubts

what id realy love to see would be a community remake of rawbots, i lack the programming knowledge for modern engines ( can do some basic C and Website stuff ) but could help with graphics and sound / music - i think of a rts game like the old earth2150 series or a bit like spore, where you get to design your units ( in an editor like the current rawbots ) then swap to an rts view where you  build those bots in factories and order them around - im afraid ill never see the daylight again once such a game comes out :-)

[MarvinMan]

I think trying to have an overarching game type/objective in which player built bots are pieces could lead to a difficulty cliff that would only make the game enjoyable to a narrow band of skill levels. If, for example, you had to build a tank bot to use in an RTS style game beginners would be struggling to hit anything in a manually controlled bot, while experienced players may have a team of automated bots capable of shooting down fast aircraft.

From what we've seen of the game so far, the best style would probably be a large sandbox with varied terrain and planets, with some resource harvesting required to build and power bots. Official built-in challeneges could be spread around the world, and there would be a way to create and share your own maps and challeneges.

A community remake would be great, but the community wasn't exactly huge back in the day, and now the forum only has 24 people who have ever posted.

[cupid_the_conqueror]

Jesus guys, its been a few months again with nothing but silence! Was nothing learned from last time around? Hell don't even talk about the game,  talk about what you had for breakfast. Better then seeing the dev-screen  go dark.

[Ceron257]

Jesus guys, its been a few months again with nothing but silence! Was nothing learned from last time around? Hell don't even talk about the game,  talk about what you had for breakfast. Better then seeing the dev-screen  go dark.

At least monthly updates would be very nice!

[MarvinMan]

Welcome!

I suppose it has been rather quiet recently, especially with the server going down for a while. But there are still a few of us here, and the server came back, so we're not going to just disappear again any time soon.

[derpistheword]

Monthly updates would very very nice indeed.

[Ceron257]

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silence
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for ever
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[MarvinMan]

Apparently gmail thinks Rawbots forum updates are spam.

Anyway, there are a few of us still here, and the domain name got renewed recently.

[z26]

Indeed, I've been playing rawbots today.  We're still there, but we kinda keep to ourselves.  We do have a skype group chat that is a bit more active than the forum, if you are interested.  I have to admit that dilluting our presence on several platforms is not the smartest move given how little activity there is.

I've told these devs already that communication is important, but they don't seem to share the sentiment from their actions...