This thread is an attempt to see how many people would be interested in participating if one was put on. The prize would likely be a cup but if possible I would like it to be an increase in rank; unfortunately I don't think anyone would agree to the latter if there were only one or two participants.
I had been considering this for a while as in my efforts to continue development on Simba I found myself unable to test it because there were no working scripts. I set out to write some of my own but soon realized I did not have the time to do that to my satisfaction.
There are two possibilities for the competition, seen above in the poll options:
- Set goal.
- General use of Simba.
If the goal is set scripts must be created to satisfy a goal that is fairly limited in scope such as training a single skill. The goals would probably be something a level three could accomplish. Skills and suggested locations would likely be chosen so there is room to add in additional goals if the contestant wants.
If there is no explicit goal then scripts would be judged on how well they do what they set out to do, with some eye towards how ambitious those goals are. This allows for the possibility of training something far above the what a fresh account could access however the judges would need to be able to run the script at some point.
As to my suggestions for the competition: Many of the extensions commonly used with Simba are unmaintained, and one in particular, AeroLib, has no source available for it even if it is open source. From a development standpoint it makes sense to abandon them so that Simba's reliance on old development tools can be eliminated and functionality can be added back in to it once it is working with the newer FreePascal toolchain. For this reason I would like to make it a competition requirement or at least a suggestion not to use things like AeroLib so that there will be code to test Simba with as development continues. The development goals might be workable even if the old extensions are used, so I can't really complain if everyone wants to use old plugins, but avoiding old plugins would make things easier.
It might go without saying but please only vote if you intend to compete, you can see what the votes are by clicking "View Poll Results."