HEC (Hostile Environment Challenge) Project

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About the project

The main idea is pretty simple, but attractive. Everyone knows the concept of a strategy game, no matter if it's an RTS or a turn-based strategy. You have to develop and defeat enemies, which have the same goal. Infact, it all turns out into gathering as much resources as possible, develop as fast as you can and create a powerful army. Let's say you (as a player) have a small set of programmable machines, which can perform different tasks (gather resources, repair other machines, research technologies, build facilities and create more robots). And you have no enemies to defeat. All you have to do is to program robots properly, so the whole population survive in an unpredictable fantastic world, where almost everything is possible. The goal of a project is to develop a challenging game, based on different kinds of mistakes, that may occur in a computer system. I'd compare the game process to the process of debugging a large program, when some parts of the code are rapidly modified by other members of the team.

It's quiet easy to make-up a nice scenery around that idea. For example, a research expedition has crashed on a strange, unknown planet. The expedition crew consists of some number of different robots, but most of them are broken because of the crash. You are the main computer of the spaceship. You have to manage to get resources to repair the ship and the robots, and to get out of the location to continue the mission. Sounds easy, but strange things happen on the planet. Robots get stuck, do the wrong things, disappear from the radar, etc. Somehow, in their programs appear instructions, that you never wrote; they begin to evaluate logical AND by the rules of evaluating logical XOR and so on...

I believe, I'm not very good in writing science-fiction stories, but I did my best for you to be able to catch the spirit of the idea... Interested? Want to join-in? We need help!

Lev Tyrnov aka juwain: juwain@users.sourceforge.net
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2007