Allegiance

While perusing the otherwise very interesting and usually somewhat 'over-my-head' downloads from MSR, I came across the Source Code Download of Allegiance.

This is a game that has been around for eons (ok, yes 4 years, but were talking space sims here). I have on occasion installed (and uninstalled) it and have played this numerous hours. Last incarnation was only last autumn, and it still resides on my home-machine (somewhere, I'm sure). Cool thing about Allegiance is the shoot-em-up style mixed with RTS, so if you really want to get anywhere in the game, you gotta do team-work. A good team beats the other side in no time. Graphics were a bit outdated (as this game has been kept alive by the community) and maps were also rather limited and small.

So I was dreaming of having this game, rewritten in .NET, with agent technology, so you could plug in your own logic for automating the tasks that inevitably get tedious and boring after a while. Update the GUI to have a sleek DirectX9 look. Eve Online has one of the best ones I've seen so far. And possible make it perpetuous and massive multiplayer like Eve. For me, that would be the ultimate game ever, combining strategy, space combat and space flight simulation, with massive maps, online gaming and persistent. The new thing here is something that seems obvious to me as a programmer and it is the automation. With the .NET Framework and its Code Access Security, one could host logic inside the game that manipulates a secured and given set of the API, same technology as Terrarium.NET (Someday they will release the code for it...).

This agent/plug-in model really could bring mmog's to a new level, not only automation of tedious tasks would be possible, but given an event model, interesting AI modules could be build. Ah, sooo many things could become possible... but I'll just dream on.

Maybe, as so many things, this already exists somewhere? Anyone know?

update: just remembered while sitting in trafic: there is this game called CoLoBot that has this type of automation/programming as main feature of the game.