The Tween Project -- Building Better Bots

Building Better Bots...

The Tween Project began in 1999, as a testbed for research into, and experimentation with, highly service aware autonomous objects. The Original purpose of the project was to build a mapping MUD robot to replace the MAAS-Neotek robot. The project evolved over a span of ten months into its present form.

The Tween Project is now a 100% Java open source development effort whose mission is to create autonomous objects that operate in a variety of MUD's, MOO's, MUSHes, and other collaborative environments with minimal changes to the software base. The autonomous object is built around a set of composable services and a flexible plug-in architecture. Together they allow programmers to easily add functionality to the autonomous objects without having to rewrite code from scratch. This allows programmers and researchers to concentrate on the functionality that they are interested in without having to worry about the low-level details inherent in constructing autonomous objects.

Because the component-based architecture is highly extensible and flexible, the Tween Project allows for customized autonomous objects to be built and tested very quickly. The autonomous object comes with a variety of ready-to-use services including collaborative environment mapping, player mapping, and responders that allow the autonomous object to interact with other users in the collaborative environment in a user-friendly fashion. The provided services are examples of functionality that can easily be created, and provide a framework for adding customized capabilities to the autonomous object.