dMZX Forums: Extend number of robots per board to 510 -> Rejected Requests -> Tracker

There are two kinds of robots; "Robot" and "PushableRobot". There are also two kinds of scrolls; "Scroll" and "Sign". Scrolls and Signs can largely be handled with Robotic code (see exception below), and thus could theoretically be converted to Robots. The IDs for Signs and Scrolls could then be reassigned to a second set of Robot and PushableRobot, effectively extending the number of robots allowed on a board to 510 (robot IDs 1-255, scroll IDs 1-255; ID 0 is not allowed, and allowing it for the second robot pool might cause unintentional breakage).

The main roadblock to this is that implementing signs/scrolls as Robots would cause these signs/scrolls to be able to receive labels from send commands, which signs/scrolls should not be able to. This isn't fixable with Robotic as it is now, but could be fixed in several ways, my preferred version being introducing a form of "lockself" that blocks sends but still allows built-in labels to trigger. Because this involves adding a new command to Robotic, this change has to wait until version 3.01 or later.

This would also introduce a minor complication with downversioning worlds; the extra robots would probably just have to be ignored.

The ability to create more than 255 board robots at runtime would be version locked.

The alternative to this is extending the parameter field of boards. This would preserve targeting robots with bpr(),() and would be generally cleaner, but potentially breaks major assumptions about the way MZX worlds work.

Updating status to: Rejected

At some point in the future this will be achieved by extending the board parameter to two bytes/adding a second board parameter.

Moving to: Rejected Requests