 April 3, 2010 - 8:10pm | Personally I like the AD style of missions and functions. After I understood them I thought they worked just fine. 1. A written mission and functions gives a GM concrete rules to determine a robot's actions by. 2. They give the players something to tinker with 3. great opportunity for things to go "south" when a player tinkers with a mission or functions and there is contradiction or ambiguity. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 April 5, 2010 - 3:51pm | I agree with you Jedi. However, I'd like to list out a slew of 'pre-made' missions with correlating functions. For a nominal fee the novice roboticist could download a set from the net for his new service robot. Perhaps each purchased set would have to be customized to fit the owner or environment, but it would be a fast and easy means, much like software programs today. That leads me to a personal disappointment with SF robots. I wish they related robotics and computers more closely. After all, computers are the brains for the bots. But outside of a technical, tutorial aspect, it will have little to do with this project. I have wondered how many functions per mission could be allowed or how many missions per robot. I believe I recall AD saying that lvl 1 bots could only perform one mission. Are other levels limited as well? Should they be? I have thought of robot levels being more like generations of development. Lvl 1 bots being first generation, up to lvl 6 being the latest generation of bot tech. If cybernetics is alive in well in a campaign, I viewed it as being cutting edge..with out all the bugs worked out. Sort of a Generation 7.0. |
 April 6, 2010 - 11:30am | Some missions and functions should be tied to specific hardware upgrades. A night recon mission would be useless without appropriate IR sensor upgrades. Entertainment functions require proper audio hardware. Medical nurse mission requires appropriate bio sensors installed. And so forth and so on. -iggy |
April 6, 2010 - 8:44pm | I was contemplating writing an article that would be a number crunch of the stats of and write out a mission and functions for 1-3 different levels of robot for each of the major listing of robots in the ad equipment list. sort of a rogues gallery but for bots. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 April 8, 2010 - 8:35am | Just throwing this out there to help with ideas; In Frontier Space - AI (artificial intelligence) for computers, ships and vehicles is simply a robot brain. Keeps things standard and simple. Instead of missions and functions we list "Director" and "Directives". A robot must have a director which could be the owner, a defined group (the security department, anyone wearing a red shirt with a Montoya Inc. badge), the crew of a ship, the CEO and CIO of a company and so on. Directives can only be give by the Director. Additionally a robot can have a hierarchy of Directors. Be careful of the level of robot brain, an astrobot programmed as the astrogator of a ship might overhear his director say in the Recroom, "My wouldn't it be nice to visit Ceti-Aplpha-Five, Grimmer?" so it goes and plots a course. :-) Missions are tasks to preform, if you use the aforementioned Skilled Frontier to program robots, these would be considered the "missions". If you need more specifics you can write it in the descriptive text. For example; a techbots whos programming is to maintain the ship could be specifically defined to "maintain the engines until directed otherwise" (instead of maintain the entire ship). Also, remember that CJ's article on glitches would be fun to add to robots - especially if PC's were tinkering with them, they might not notice that new glitch (might get a r0b0w00t  ) |
April 8, 2010 - 3:56pm | ... anyone wearing a red shirt with a Montoya Inc. badge... w00t your optical sensors need recalibrating. Montoya Inc officers wear blue shirts (see Inigo's picture to the left of his posts). The red shirt guys are the temps who always get eaten by the rock monster or 'waporized'.-iggy |
April 8, 2010 - 7:13pm | iggy says, "One who wears a non-red shirt always lives." :-) |
April 8, 2010 - 8:14pm | it has been scientifically proven that the color red actually attracts kinetic & and laser energy which is why ninja's always wear black. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
April 9, 2010 - 3:39pm | That would explain both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. |
April 9, 2010 - 5:30pm | That would explain both the American Revolution and the War of 1812.  I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 August 24, 2016 - 4:58pm | I agree with you Jedi. However, I'd like to list out a slew of 'pre-made' missions with correlating functions. For a nominal fee the novice roboticist could download a set from the net for his new service robot. Perhaps each purchased set would have to be customized to fit the owner or environment, but it would be a fast and easy means, much like software programs today. That leads me to a personal disappointment with SF robots. I wish they related robotics and computers more closely. After all, computers are the brains for the bots. But outside of a technical, tutorial aspect, it will have little to do with this project. I have wondered how many functions per mission could be allowed or how many missions per robot. I believe I recall AD saying that lvl 1 bots could only perform one mission. Are other levels limited as well? Should they be? I have thought of robot levels being more like generations of development. Lvl 1 bots being first generation, up to lvl 6 being the latest generation of bot tech. If cybernetics is alive in well in a campaign, I viewed it as being cutting edge..with out all the bugs worked out. Sort of a Generation 7.0. That's a good idea. Joe Cabadas |
