Robot Builder ideas

You helped design the Tournament, and it turned out great — it's live and people are using it. We want to do that again, this time for something bigger: making it easier for you (or anyone) to build a robot in the first place. Edit this page (the Edit button at the top) and write your answers under Your ideas. Nothing you write here can break anything.

What we're thinking about building

1. Start from a robot, not a blank page. Pick hunter, circler, or any saved robot, get your own copy in an editor, and change it from there instead of starting from nothing.
2. Instant feedback. If you write something with a mistake, you find out fast, with a plain-word explanation instead of a wall of errors.
3. One cheat-sheet, not a manual. All the moves your robot can make (scan, cannon, drive, and the rest) on one small list right next to where you're typing, not a big page of everything the whole program can do.
4. Better battle pictures. Robots move smoother, right in your browser, and you'll actually see the moment a cannon fires and the moment a shell hits, not just a robot that's suddenly missing some armor.
5. Watch your code think. Step through your robot's program one line at a time and see exactly what it does on the field at that instant — like a slow-motion instant replay of your own program's decisions, both in the plain code and in the low-level instructions the computer actually runs.

Here's roughly the layout we're picturing:

boxwid = 1.5in; boxht = 1.0in
EDIT: box "Your code" bold fill lightblue
HELP: box "Quick help:\nscan, cannon,\ndrive, ..." with .w at EDIT.e + (0.5in,0)
FIELD: box "Battlefield" bold fill lightyellow with .n at EDIT.s - (0,0.5in)
arrow from EDIT.s down 0.2in then to FIELD.n chop thick
text "type -> see it fight" small italic with .w at FIELD.e + (0.2in,0)

Questions for you

• When you start writing a robot, do you want to copy an existing one and change it, or start from a blank page?
• When you make a mistake, do you want to be told while you're still typing, or after you press a "check" button?
• What's more fun to watch: your code running one line at a time, or the battle running fast with big explosions?
• Should robots be able to have a custom look on the battlefield (a color, a shape, a name tag), or should they all look the same so nothing but the code matters?
• Anything else you'd want next to the editor, or in the battle picture, that we haven't thought of?

Your ideas

(write here)