Starcore

Starcore
Rank	Administrator
Political Stance	Wisdom Tooth, Legend of RA2, Informationalist, Innovationalist, rarely n00b whacker
	Grudge / Ally Status
Allies With	ACAMS, DarkRat, Rejected, Madiaba, most of the older, more experienced builders.
Grudges With	Unknown. No one should dare to go against the mighty Starcore anyways.
Fear Rating	95/100
Respect Rating	95/100

One of RA2's earliest and current AI master, Starcore created the widely used Starcore AI packs, which replace the weak Stock AI with some truly dangerous machines. As a pure builder, he's no slouch; from the devastating rammer Warmachine to the mighty HS Tempus Fugit, Starcore can take any design and make the best use of it.

Starcore joined the AceUplink RA2 Forums in December 2003 and was banned from their forums before even posting his first post. It was a mix-up, they thought his IP was owned by a toxic member the forums admins had recently banned. But it almost cost the RA2 Community one of its great builders and the founding father of the Starcore AI packs and DSL. It is hard to know if RA2 would still be being played if not for his efforts. Luckily the banning got sorted out and Starcore went on to post his first bot, Borg Queen, in late December 2003 on the forums. RFS called it, "Overloaded" and ACAMS defended Starcore by saying, "How can it be overloaded, that is like having too much money!"

Starcore v1.0

Starcore released the first Starcore Stock AI pack on January 17, 2004, with 15 teams (of 3-bots each) of his own design (with a bit of help from his sons) all Stock and showing off a wide range of building technique and examples. He believed online competitions and tournaments of the time were ruled by a few bot builders that kept various bot building techniques and Botlab glitches to themselves inducing unfair advantages. Up to and including using hidden parts and AI parts because once a bot was built others couldn't tell from the outside in a Stock competition. Starcore wanted everyone to have a chance to learn and compete on a level playing field. There was also an issue back then of AI packs using unbalanced custom parts to try and give the AI bots unfair advantages over the players that didn't have the same parts available in their bot building. Starcore felt that there was plenty of power to be shown in tight, diverse, efficient Stock AIed bots.

Starcore v2.0

The Starcore v2.0 pack was released on March 11th, 2004, less than two months after Starcore v1.0. For the second Starcore pack, a PM from Rejected (called such because he too had been hit by the banhammers of AceUplink) on ways to improve Alien Queen's stability started a friendship and opened the doors allowing others to include their own bots and teams to show off building skills and even more diverse ranges of bot types and techniques. This brought in teams by Rejected, ACAMS, Clutch, Diablo, and Eyce. And many individual bots by Pheud, ACAMS, toAst, Artitan, Clutch, and Rejected. This saw the birth of such famous bots as the Poker VS, Clockwork Hydra, and probably the first Juggler in RA2 Neglected Waterbug. The pack also saw the advent of the Antweight and Beetleweight Classes and the inclusion of 6-bot teams thanks to code from Disturbed. This helped grow the pack to near 3 times its size at 20 teams of 6 bots each.

DSL-TC

At this point, Starcore was ready to call it good and move on to other things. He had gotten to talking with DarkRat who had made a lot of custom parts and gorgeous art bot creations for the replica contests and Lu-Tze, a leading component maker who was dealing with health issues behind scenes. Both DarkRat and Lu-Tze were feeling the same way about wrapping things up and so the trio decided to do a final swan song to help the RA2 Community. At that point, there was no balancing efforts or standards for developing custom or real life replica components and prior replica packs by others were fraught with unbreakable bots and components. Starcore, DarkRat, and Lu-Tze joined together to balance, populate and AI DarkRat's replica bots, set up standards for custom components, update the interface and arenas and thus DSL-TC (the DarkRat-Starcore-Lu-Tze Total Conversion) was born. As a point of interest, at the time of building DSL-TC, many of the RA2 community forums were fighting and bickering. Since many saw DSL-TC as the future of RA2 and wanted to be involved, Starcore leveraged the DSL-TC pack to force the warring forums to come together and get along. This was instrumental in healing the RA2 community.

Starcore v3.0

During the summer of 2004 in the middle of spearheading DSL-TC with DarkRat and Lu-Tze, Starcore was also working on growing and expanding the Starcore AI pack. He added new AI routines like Omni.py and OmniRammer.py that have become defacto standards in the RA2 community. And many people, seeing the success of Starcore v2.0, jumped in to have their bots included in Starcore v3.0. Lu-Tze provided the Starcore Arena, DarkRat provided a cool themed in-game selection screen and Rejected provided again a great pack splash screen. Instead of making new bots, Starcore's time became filled with AIing entries from others and tightening and/or rebuilding their bots to be more efficient and effective. The Troll being an example of shrinking a SHW down to a more effective though still funky HW. Many exotic bots were brought in including Vortex CE, Rabid Pit Bull, Hunter Killer Tank and others by Rejected; 3-2-1 Blastoff!, Flying Sheep and others by Foolishevil; and the first stilt bot ever seen, Mome Rath by Corporate Goon. There was also a major influx of new 6-bot themed teams, many following the pattern of LW, MW, HW, AW, BW, SHW including teams from FoolishEvil, C2, Spawngeek, Jimxorb, Viper, EpicentrE, WardenX, ACAMS, Rejected, Artitan, Gemini, Clutch and Karnage. This grew the pack to a whopping 35 teams of 6 bots each for a total of 210 effective, diverse, and dangerous Stock bots.

Starcore v4.0

Starcore planned to release a v4.0 of the AI pack in 2005, but he disappeared from the community for quite some time dealing with real life needs. He returned in 2007, and released two Alpha versions of Starcore v4.0 tightening designs, upgrading most of the bots to DSA, many to include Caster armor, and converting weapon motors wiring from AI switch activation to button activation which greatly improved the spin up times and damage potential of many of the bots. Starcore also worked with Madiaba on many of the shapes of the Madiaba Smartzones and promoted their use. The RA2 community again pulled together to help rebuild, review, and test the updated bots. This put the Starcore pack back at the forefront of the RA2 Stock packs as one of the most challenging and diverse packs ever released. Many members of this community cut their teeth and grow their skills reviewing and competing against the Starcore pack bots.

Starcore v4.0 Reboot

In mid-2017 Starcore circled around to see if there was interest in helping to finish up the Starcore v4.0 pack. Many jumped to assist and be involved in a Starcore pack. To show off latest skills and abilities. It has been over 10 years since the Starcore packs have been touched. And while many are deep into DSL and its variants, there is still interest in finishing up the Meta of RA2 Stock AI packs. The target is to fix any bots in need of fixing from Starcore v4.0 Alpha2, rebuild as needed using latest learnings and grow the pack by roughly 10 more teams to bring it to a grand total of 45 teams of 6 bots each with a double rotate system to bring 15 teams at a time into view for the internal RA2 tournament system.

Starcore has also been an RA2 forum admin and ran Gametechmods along with Goose, Darkrat, Clickbeetle, and ACAMS.

Starcore's activity on the forums had slowed to a crawl between 2007 and 2017, but he still enters worthy tournaments once in a while and has seemingly lost none of his skill. He also tends to appear and post when his name is mentioned, kind of like the bat light, an event dubbed "the Starcore effect" by R0B0SH4RK.

Building skills

Stock: Created the Starcore AI packs, building a majority of the first 15 teams along with many of the packs Antweights. Still a great Stock builder, even after leaving and returning to the community for years at a time. Innovated structured AI files, wrote AI tutorials and many of the standard .py files still in use today including the defacto standard, Omni.py.

DSL: Program Manager, Design Lead, and AI for DSL-TC 1.0. Starcore started the DSL-TC project, building most the internals and AI for the Stock DSL 1.0 bots.

Notable Robots

Tempus Fugit: A Lightweight horizontal spinner with 6 razor tips and 2 z-teks as weapons. Starcore came back to RA2 briefly and entered an old version in BBEANS3 but didn't fair well. This showed to Starcore the community had grown and improved and spurred him into creating a massively updated version for the for Starcore v4 Alpha making it one of the strongest LW HS around.

Fury: Bigger brother to the updated Tempus Fugit. Fury with the same style of ultra-tight asymmetrical shell is one of the legendary MW HS. Partnered with ACAMS's Death Warrant in the Team Tag Tournament. it was notable that Death Warrant was repeatedly destroyed by Fury while trying to reach their opponents. Fury placed second in Wild Robots Live 2 and won the ROBONOVA 2 championship with Ounce's Paramecium-I.

Maelstrom: A pretty good HW HS. It had wedges in the v3 of the Starcore AI packs, but it now has more defense with front and back plows and belly caster armor.

Spin Doctor: A HW HS/SnS hybrid with 30 irons. It may not be perceived as good as a Pure HS in sheer damage potential, but with its SnS code and belly caster armor, it is much better against popups.

Alien Queen: One of the most distinctive RA2 VS ever built. Alien Queen was built because Starcore felt he could out-do a famous bot of the time called Digital Apocalypse (DA) and wanted to provide out of the box thinking examples on how to build VS bots. Alien Queen has been updated, improved, and made more stable with each edition of the Starcore AI packs.

T-800 Terminator (BBEANS): A solid HW HS with 27 Maces, 2 Spikes, and 4 Ram Plates. It did very well in BBEANS5.