Help! Making Scout auton and I just don't understand

[darksider]

Well, I made an "additional autons" mod, after some huge quantities of trial-and-errors.
(Please read the thread on the UTF here, and download and see the code if you care http://z8.invisionfree.com/Transcendenc ... 2138&st=40 )

The mod is mostly finished (at least it is balanced, in a wicked way), yet leaves so much to be improved, since I am more of a testplayer rather than a programmer and my skill and understandings of Transcendence codes are terribly limited.
Honestly, although I think I have some basic understandings on computer logic (but what's the lambda calculus anyway?), I have very little knowledge on programming and I don't know anything about LISP language, and I just don't understand anything at all!

So if you have some idea on these following questions (or you have further questions, you feel my questions are too vague or incomprehensible, or simply want to say something), please post them.

I want to decide if I can improve this mod or not, and in addition to that,
find basic ideas and some additional neat tricks to make more interesting mods.

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1. Is it possible to use <Globals> or anything to automatically (that is, without doing anything whatsoever) activate a "RecurringTimerEvent"?
If possible, how? And is there any other way to do things like this?
(using <OnCreate> didn't work well)

2. If my understanding is correct, using this line
(objCommunicate obj senderObj msg [obj] [data])
the auton accepts only messages in integer, and "14" means "Stay there still" and "13" means "Form up"
but "1" with any illegal command crashes the game and most other numbers are simply ignored.
Is there any other valid command other than these ones?
I tried to command an auton to "patrol" centering on the player ship, and rightly failed.
Is there any way to make an auton patrol around?
And this raises another question; is a ship-centered "patrol" command valid?
(Well, this seems to be valid, looking into the code for Antarctica)

3. And, how do I make "Turn Radar on" command not to show up when it is already activated?
My attempt here also failed, as you can see.

4. And, is the idea correct that extra paramaters saved in a friendly ship following you will be lost when you use a stargate and move to another star system?
But, how are the friendly ships' damage (and radioactive contamination perhaps) stored?

5. Is there any way to show a usual undockable ship on the map?
"A ship with no docking port with a dockScreen defined" was unusable, since it causes some weird behaviour.

6. Finally, how do you think of the mod? Cool? Useless? Just uninteresting? Got some bugs or typos?

7. And thanks for your time!

[Ttech]

Good job. I love the spider. Repair Armor, install devices. Nice.
The spy auton, does not exactly work quite like I expected. But I am still testing that one.

[Ttech]

Minor bug in the code, you don't need to recall the <!entitys if you are not calling them as in redoing the items. At leat6 it owrks just fine without them. Also, I make hte TEch level a bit heigher, the level you had was quite low, even for hte CommonWealth Stations.

[darksider]

Ttech, thanks for your reply

The spy auton, does not exactly work quite like I expected.

Yeah, mainly that's why I made this topic to gather ideas here, though I've got no one's response so far

Minor bug in the code, you don't need to recall the <!entitys if you are not calling them as in redoing the items.

They are for "compatibility issue" for previous versions, so I think I'll leave as it is unless it causes additional problems now.

the level you had was quite low

That is intended, since it will be too useful and overpowered, and it should be unrealistic if you can install technically advanced devices with just a autonomous robot.
And I think it is still useful, since it can replace your armor or remove devices without any limitation, and the most important thing is that its tech-level is set to level 4, which means it allows you to install some illegal devices.

Thank you for the suggestion, but I'm not really going to change this

[Ttech]

Ttech, thanks for your reply

The spy auton, does not exactly work quite like I expected.

Yeah, mainly that's why I made this topic to gather ideas here, though I've got no one's response so far

Minor bug in the code, you don't need to recall the <!entitys if you are not calling them as in redoing the items.

They are for "compatibility issue" for previous versions, so I think I'll leave as it is unless it causes additional problems now.

the level you had was quite low

That is intended, since it will be too useful and overpowered, and it should be unrealistic if you can install technically advanced devices with just a autonomous robot.
And I think it is still useful, since it can replace your armor or remove devices without any limitation, and the most important thing is that its tech-level is set to level 4, which means it allows you to install some illegal devices.

Thank you for the suggestion, but I'm not really going to change this

heh, exept me.

I didn't know htat. I'll remembver htat.

No, I did with the bot, is make it comperable to the Common Wealth Stations. Nothing higher.