Molyneux wrote:Shadowtraveler wrote:Computer science-wise, the problem with the Slyandro Probes in Star Control 2.
Perhaps you might furnish those of us who've never heard of Star Control with an explanation?
Well, in Star Control 2 the player's ship occasionally encountered probes from a race called Slylandro, who'd always, no matter what you said in the dialogue screen, attack you with a short ranged lightning weapon. When you eventually found the Slylandro homeworld, it turned out they were halfway gaseous lifeforms who hadn't actually built any probes, but bought them from the Melnorme (the interstellar traders in all sorts of stuff in SC). The probes were actually built for resource gathering and exploration, but the Slylandro set their behavior parameters a bit wrong. They set the resource gathering priority to absolute maximum, which led to the probes basically trying to harvest any resources they found, even if said resources came in the form of a non-hostile spaceship.
Eventually the whole dilemma was solved when the player informed the Slylandro that their probes were attacking everything on sight with a lightning gun, which led to them realizing it was actually in resource gathering mode during the attack (since the lightning thingy was supposed to be used for harvesting, and in combat it was supposed to use some sort of a missile battery). After that the Slylandro gave the player the control codes so the probes could be set to balanced behavior when encountered.
I think Shadowtraveler meant how the Slylandro explained the probe behavior control worked. It was said you just gave it a number between 0 and 99 for each function it could do. The Slylandro set the resource gathering to 99 to get more probes ready as soon as possible, and left the rest at something like 5, resulting in the resource gathering to override all other considerations when encountering other ships.
