This is my first ever Scratch program, which has taken me about 4 hours to make since first being exposed to Scratch, so it's not going to be as polished as some of the games here; however it really doesn't matter too much because looking good isn't the point of this game! Playing the game is simple. Start it off and wait until it finishes... there are *no* controls! So what's the point I hear you ask? - the point is to modify the programming logic in the Roomba to clean the floor more efficiently than the really dumb code that I supply is doing, before your battery runs flat. So it's a game where you have to think about the programming, because a change to the program can take a few seconds but you have to wait several minutes as the vacuum does its job before you know how well you've done! Roughly, this is how the program works: there is a base layer which is an image of one floor of a building. Above that sits the Roomba, and above that is any furniture that the Roomba can work underneath of. There is also another hidden layer which is a mask showing where the Roomba cannot go (walls, table or chair legs etc). A good program will have to work well with different room layouts, not just the one that I supply... Try designing a few of your own for testing when you think you've got a good algorithm. Unfortunately due to my inexperience with Scratch, this isn't a proper Roomba simulator - you can for example move through a wall if you move too fast; and you could easily hack the code to use less power than I currently have it set to (so you can cover more floor space before running out) - but I trust you not to do things like that, and anyway your code is going to be visible so we'll see how it works. I should also really have a way of working out how much of the floor you have covered before running out of power, but that's another Scratch trick I haven't learned yet - hopefully one of you will add that and feed it back for everyone. The images I'm using were taken from the net (and I'd be hard pressed to remember where from); obviously the Roomba name and image is copyright of the iRobot Corporation. They seem be to a good bunch of hackers who encourage robotics experiments with their kit so I doubt they'll object to our use of it here, but if it becomes an issue we can change the image for a turtle and make it a challenge of how much grass the turtle can eat..? You may also note that the registration of the different layers and the placement of the chair legs etc isn't too accurate. I threw it together quickly by hand, and make no excuses. I certainly didn't think I could learn a language, and design and implement a game in it between lunch and dinner, so I hope some sloppiness with the image editor is to be forgiven. Regards, Graham Toal (a LOGO programmer from long ago) TO DO: better collision detection a power level meter proper accounting for power used re amount of turning and moving map editor counting pixels wiped and show % of floor cleaned fix the graphics of the doors add a 'home base' allow 'lighthouse' with on/off timer proper simulator environment so that players can only modify the Roomba logic.
