

Robocom: a game for programmers - jamii
http://robocom.rrobek.de/

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trun
If you're into this kind of thing, you should check out Battlecode
(<http://www.battlecode.org>). It's primarily an MIT competition, but in
recent years we've opened it up to the general public. Also, several YC alums
are former devs.

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mclin
> Your goal is to put the other robots out of action. But not with weapons!

Hey! What's the fun in that? :P

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franciscoapinto
It was a disappointment to check the downloads page and discover that there
isn't anything other than a windows version available.

EDIT: It does seem to run on wine.

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travelboy
Hi, I'm the guy who invented RoboCom back in 97. Yes, RoboCom Workshop is
Windows only (unfortunately), but there is a compatible interpreter named
RoboTour which has been ported to various OS. It's not at fancy as RoboCom
Workshop but it basically does the same.

The most exciting news about RoboCom is that I have started to re-write
RoboCom as a web application in pure JavaScript (actually CoffeeScript). It
runs in any modern web browser. The compiler and the simulator core both
somewhat work, but it's very early alpha. The thing is that I have currently
no time to continue the development because I founded a company which keeps me
super-busy... but expect it to happen some day :)

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ArekDymalski
It's some kind of Core Wars clone, right?

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weavejester
There are similarities, but it's a very different game. Robocom takes place on
a 2D grid, and more resembles a fight between microorganisms. Each bot has its
own individual memory banks, but these can be overwritten by other bots. So
you might inject an instruction into an enemy to tell it to die, but a more
effective strategy might be to instruct the enemy bot to infect others for
several turns and _then_ die.

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ckdarby
News hasn't been updated there since 2009..

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klez
With all the 0x10C stuff that has been produced lately, I remembered I saw a
game where you have to program AI to battle your opponents, but I couldn't
remember the name.

Now I may have something to do :)

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sinhpham
Maybe it's robocode? <http://robocode.sourceforge.net/>

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klez
Not quite, it ran on DOS and was coded in an assembly-like language. Chances
are it actually was robocom.

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Auguste
Oh wow, I used to tinker with this back in high school. Unfortunately, I could
never convince my friends to join in, and I eventually lost interest. I'm
impressed that it's still around.

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pilot_pirx
Linux version would be nice.

~~~
jamii
It runs perfectly under wine.

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xmmx
Karel.turnRight();

~~~
azelfrath
That was honestly my first thought when I read about this. I could see Mehran
playing this in his spare time. It would be a pretty great end-of-semester
project too, having a competition like this in the class. Everyone would know
Java, but they would have to learn a new language by building off what they
already know.

