This was started as a group project for a C programming course at University of Lugano (http://www.inf.unisi.ch). This code was written by seven 3rd semester students (with aid from the TA) in a week, working on average 2-3 hours every day.
The game is mostly based on CROBOTS (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crobots for more info), with the following main differences: 1) the game logic was designed from scratch based on the CROBOTS manual; bugs and exact timings of CROBOTS are not emulated. 2) the robots run concurrently rather than in time sharing; this means that doing math is basically free in the robots. 3) the shooting and scanning angles are measured clockwise to allow using the C library's sin/cos/atan functions. 4) divisions by zero will crash the robot (kill it) rather than restart it.
Here is the structure:
fight - Driver to start a robot fight!
Makefile - Makefile to build the sample robots and the server
doc/ - LaTeX documentation, based on CROBOTS by Tom Poindexter.
server/ - Source code for the server, released under the GPL (should work on MacOS and Linux).
clients/ - Source code for five sample robots (four rewrites of the samples provided with CROBOTS, and a rewrite of ESPOTRUN.R) and for the client, in the public domain.
The code is released hoping that other people can help improving it.
For how to program a robot, see doc/robots.tex.
To compile the program (right now it only works on MacOS X, see below!) do
make
To start a fight, use the enclosed fight script as follows:
./fight ./counter ./rook ./sniper ./spot
This will start the four enclosed "fighter" robots (the fifth, "rabbit", does not shoot at all and can be used to start training your own robots).
Possible tasks include:
easy: document the client/server protocol
easy: rewrite the client library in Java/Perl/Python/Ruby (includes additional portability benefits!)
easy: Windows port of the server (SDL provides a replacement for setitimer)
easy: modify clients/robots.h to provide a compatibility layer allowing to run old CROBOTS code.
easy: write a non-graphic version of the server
medium: Windows port of the C client library
medium: integrate the "fight" script into the server.
None. :-)
The authors of the initial release are:
game logic Davide Arrigo
Masiar Babazadeh
Roberto Minelli
graphics Sascha Dominguez
Matthias Eberli
networking Remo Lemma
Patrick Zulian
coordination Paolo Bonzini <bonzini@gnu.org>