Hello, clowns, husks, and fellow members of this community.
You may recognize me as the guy who posted a story about my lucky escape from Moloch while being completely alone. (Called "Lucky escape and sudden death") One person from this community suggested that I automate my guns, and I got hooked on the idea. Then I imagined something bigger: a remotely controlled autonomous submarine, operated by logic systems handling everything from weapons to movement.
I'm an IT engineer, so with enough brilliance—and insanity—I figured I could pull it off. With 16k marks in my pocket, I went to the electrician at the outpost and bought various logic components. The first thing I tested was a communication component (the one with the Wi-Fi icon). I discovered that I could send messages via radio chat to a terminal using it. That was a solid start, because it meant that—using a regular expression component (or even more directly)—I could send commands to the submarine. It would be slow and clunky, but still functional for control.
Next, I thought that if I could find a way to enable autopilot and set coordinates, I’d be able to control the submarine’s movement. After that, I tried to automate the guns. To do that, I needed the exact coordinates of enemies in real time. I assumed it would be simple, so I grabbed a screwdriver and opened the periscope. Nothing useful there. Then I went outside the sub and opened the gun—again, nothing helpful from a logic standpoint.
So I started swimming around the sub, thinking about possible solutions, and then I spotted the motion detector. I opened it and saw that I could adjust its detection zone. I paused to think about how I could use this. My idea was: if I could change the detection zone via logic, I could build a primitive, crude, but functional radar—and then enhance it with prediction algorithms based on parallax and other techniques.
I went back to test it (this whole thought process took about ten minutes), opened the motion detector again with a screwdriver… and found out that you can’t change the detection zone via logic.
Devs, honestly—what the hell? You’ve given players the ability to build a functional computer, but not the ability to create AI-controlled guns?