Heh... I remember some of those old days.  Robert had a flair for coming up with different ideas that seemed very simple and yet held a broad effectiveness.  In a lot of ways that's the style that I came to miss when the game's doppler register and high speed CPUs started to force everybody to use tracking algorithms and be prepared to kill or die as soon as the starting gun went off.

For what it's worth, I've finished my second degree at the Art Institute of Portland and have been working for Backbone Entertainment in Emeryville, California the last three-plus years as a game programmer and sometimes-designer.  On the other hand, I never quite forgot RoboWar even besides just getting the occasional note on the group.

Putting a successor RoboWar on the iPhone might be kind of neat, although I think it would probably have to be much-simplified from the original, because I'd tend to think that the iPhone wouldn't be a very good platform for coding bots in anything that resembles the meta-assembly language that they were written in 20 years ago.  (Yeek... it's really been almost 20 years now.  I feel old.)

Good to hear from you all...

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Hogg
Sent: Jul 5, 2009 3:17 AM
To: robowar@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [robowar] Re: Robowar Group

My son Robert Hogg was very into RoboWar at one time. He is now a robotics engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. He and I and three others have an iPhone software business on the side called Toy Kite Software and we just released our first game called iSamurai: Two-Player Sword Fight.

Lately I have been thinking that it would be awesome to have a commercially-viable successor to RoboWar, perhaps running on the iPhone. Among other things, it would provide a vehicle for teaching programming in schools and clubs. We have an intern at our company learning C and I know that he would go faster if he could program some robots.

:-)

Doug Hogg
http://toykite.com