Robbie the Assistant

[RaptorParkowsky]

How about we add an option in menu to enable/disable Robbie the Assistant?

Well, I don't like this idea, because Robbie for now is doing nothing than spying the user/player and providing a link to SatCom. That shouldn't disturb the user/player in the Exercises that much like if we would implement her in every Mission. In future her role may change more and she will probably be more helpful and important in the Exercises, so turning off her would be not a good idea.

It's he, she, or it? How it was described in Epsitec sources?

Formally she's a robot, so "it". But the "Robbie" name clearly belong to female, so character of that robot is rather female. She probably would sound like Blupi or musician robot from BuzzingCars so it even fit to name it "her".

Where and how it could be implemented? I don't think that Robby/Robbie would have a place in main story (but maybe when we'll turn on solution?), I don't see it in freegame too, it would be hard to add this in exercises or challenges. But definitely it could be available in custom maps.

As I said, for now I propose to add her to only Exercises as a hint for the user/player to hit F1 or click on her to get the information about the exercise. Probably she will make also an appearance in the first missions on Earth as a guide, but not now. This will need the possibility to program her in CBOT == future development. For now, I would use only her already implemented features so the Exercises (as they aren't in the main story) are good and easy to implement place for her.

Not needed. It can't be used in CBot anyway, it's blacklisted from all functions like radar() etc.

In the future her movement and animations should be somehow programmable, especially when we will use her as assistant in the first missions, so I would treat her as half-normal object in the scene, which must be created somewhere and then do some scripted stuff. radar() also should be able to find her.

This is not how this was meant to work. There was some code somewhere that created this object independent of level file. Since it's NOT a normal level object, I think we should kinda stick to this way of creating it, maybe through some other parameter like

Code:

Level robbie=true

When she will somehow programmable and doing other things than spying the left corner of the screen, that may become important to where she must be placed first at the begin of the level.

Of couse, we must bring back the TotoMode option (maybe under a diffrent name) that was supposed to turn this assistant on and off. Some people may prefer to stay in classic Colobot style and disable it.

Again, I don't like that idea, because for now even I don't 100% sure what her future development would like to be and how she will be important in the Exercises after levels refactoring. If that's enough easy to implement, so ok, but that will probably need another option in level's scene file that determines it over CreateObject pos=0.0;0.0 dir=0.0 type=RobbieAssistant.

In my opinion it doesn't really fit in the Colobot universe.

Well, for me it fit really good. She's very EPSITEC'esque.

Robby could be flying in one of the screen corners at the beginning of each mission (except Amnesia for example), along with the "press F1" message. Maybe she should repeat it (with real voice in the future) until a player actually press it and then disappear after the player returns to the game.

That doesn't really fit into the plot in every mission. Only in the first mission there's good place for her existance, but in the space and beyond, far away from Earth, the Astronaut should be alone.

Also, she could be a very interesting tutor and commentator in the main story. If I remember correctly, we were even considering putting her in the first Earth tutorial missions. I would like to see her at least there as it would give a little refreshment and make problems with (bad, for now) tutorial easier to solve. I personally know too many people, for whom the first missions were not obvious and boring. Robby would make the introduction to the game much more interesting, and the first few minutes are probably the most important part of the game (this is the moment of fight, which will end up with a player being interested in the game or uninstalling and forgetting it forever).

Totally ++ && ++.