BotWars
A battle arena for your code!
Today I've performed the production server build of BotWars.io - This has now replaced the existing landing page, however I'll probably add the eMail capture form back onto the home page soon.
It's still a very early Alpha/Beta version, however my main motive was to get something live that friends could begin to play around with, so I can get some feedback before going on with marketing.
So it's quite often suggested that you should scratch your own itch - Back around 2013 one of the things that really got me into programming was a game posted on Hacker News called RobotGame.
The game was quite simply where people could upload their own Python code which was the "brain" of your robot, then the site would place spawn your robot in an area with another player, and at the end of 100 turns, there was (hopefully) a winner.
Unfortunately, the game doesn't exist anymore (from what I can see), and at the time it has some issues with its security.
My plan is to bring back something similar, but with support for more than just Python, and hopefully inspire some future generations of coders, or just bring back some enjoyment to coding for people like myself.
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This sounds like so much fun haha. Look forward to it! Do you have any screenshots or articles from the original, I'm interested in how this works.
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Below should hopefully be a GIF of a game from the original one.
Basically at each turn, the game will call the user code with the state of the map, the user code then returns an instruction for each of its bots (move, defend, attack, self destruct).
So the player needs to come up with some kind of tactic to evade the enemy or attack a single enemy in unison.
The original only worked with Python code, however I'm hoping that my solution will work with any code - So it'll be easier for everyone to participate, and have a true battle of the languages 😁
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This looks awesome. I remember doing a similar project when in school, but it was just each block had one of two different algorithms to see which was best. This would be so much fun multiplayer, I'll be following your progress!
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4 Comments
Looks like you've made great progress! Can't wait to dive in this weekend and check it out!
Beta is good so far. One of the big things so far is that when you edit a bot (code or about sections) and you hit save, it seems to save at first (you can go back and see it) but then in a few minutes if you go back to edit the changes are wiped. Let me know if I can help with more info. It seems to be always resetting my code which means I can't really get my bot going :(. Seems like maybe it gets wiped when it starts queueing into battles?
Thanks, and sorry! – I’ve got a fix for this deployed now, in the future I’ll improve it a little more by adding some versioning to the saving of code, so it’s more obvious what code a bot was running, and what the changes are, it also helps with concurrency and updates.
No problem! Thats pretty much what I was going to suggest. I haven't had time to go back and check it out but I will soon
This comment was deleted 6 years ago