30 day battle records

Fragment of a discussion from Talk:RoboRumble
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The "should we make another rumble" or "should we restart the rumble" was something that has been tossed around for years. Generally the answers have been no. Mostly since there was no very good reason to do so.

Perhaps when we get obstacles into the game, we can get a new rumble going with a special arena, or urban combat robots.

Chase05:44, 1 February 2013

About obstacles in the game. There is a mod called Virtual Combat which is exactly that.

MN17:46, 1 February 2013
 

Also BerryBots has obstacles in a very robust / configurable fashion, as opposed to tacked onto a game not designed for it. =)

(I think you're both on Windows, though, and it's not on Windows yet. Very soon though. I bought Windows 8 and got BerryBots running on it, but there's some more stuff to be done before releasing.)

Voidious17:51, 1 February 2013
 

Just make sure it is usable on Windows 7. That is, don't use anything that is Windows 8 only.

Chase03:06, 2 February 2013
 

Pretty confident that won't be a problem. I'm using MinGW, and the graphics libraries are wxWidgets and SFML, both of which are cross-platform and I'm compiling them from source too. But I'm not going out and buying any more friggin' copies of Windows =), so hopefully I can get someone to test it out.

Voidious03:24, 2 February 2013

I have Windows 7 and I am very excited about trying BerryBots.

Just out of curiosity, is 8 really as bad as they say?

Sheldor03:44, 2 February 2013
 

I haven't really used Windows since XP, and I haven't played with 8 much yet. So far my impression is mainly that the UI has some nice little things, isn't much better or worse than XP, but definitely a lot weirder. I like that they're at least trying something different but I expected it to like it a little more than I do.

Voidious03:46, 2 February 2013
 

I'm turned off by Windows 8, myself. I like Windows 7, but I don't use it. I'm still using XP, primarily because copies of Windows are always about twice as expensive as I am willing to pay. I'm kind of hoping once Windows 8 is going full steam, that copies of Windows 7 might get discounted to a price I am actually willing to play.

You know what -- I make decent pay at my job, but I'm still not willing to pay what Microsoft wants for copies of Windows. I have to think that very very few people actually buy copies of Windows, if I'm not willing to. I would guess most people just use whatever comes on whatever machine they buy. I build my own computers, so that is not really an option for me. If I could get games to run under Linux, I would probably switch. Games are the only thing really holding me to Windows at this point.

Back a little closer to on topic, if there were to be a new Rumble, I would want the full list of robots in it. I probably would not participate in a combat with obstacles, just due to lack of spare time for play. If I had more time, I would get into the existing melee first.

Skotty15:54, 2 February 2013
 

Prompted by some interest from Chase, I posted the current in-development version of BerryBots, compiled for Windows (on Windows 8/MinGW): berrybots_wintest1.zip (~20 MB). You should be able to just unzip and run berrybots.bat. If anyone wants to test it out, I'd love to hear if/how well it works on other Windows's - I haven't tested anywhere beyond my own Windows 8 install.

One thing I'd be curious to hear is if tab navigation in the dialogs works - it's not working for me on Win8, but does on other platforms. Trying to figure out if I need to hand-code that for Windows.

Voidious17:48, 13 February 2013

I'm getting an error when I try to run on Win7: "The program can't start because libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem".

Skilgannon21:23, 13 February 2013
 

Ok, much thanks for testing it out. Chase got something similar, so I guess I have some research to do. Maybe it is depending on having MinGW installed or something.

Voidious21:26, 13 February 2013
 

I'm able to duplicate this by removing MinGW stuff from my path. I just need to straighten out static linking and/or including the .dll's for a couple things. Hope to have another test version posted soon for anyone still willing to help.

Voidious21:51, 13 February 2013
 

Well, the simplest solution is apparently to just include the MinGW DLL's I depend on. I've put them here (just drop them in berrybots/), and the updated zip with them is here.

I'd rather not be distributing all these DLLs so I'm going to look into statically linking against them. But since I'm also dynamically linking to wxWidgets, which links to these, I have to switch to statically linking against that first. I guess there's also debate about how dynamic vs static vs any linking at all relates to the GPL terms, but I'm already using a more permissive license than that, anyway.

If nothing else, this whole "build a cross-platform / native desktop GUI app" has been a pretty educational experience. :-)

Voidious22:33, 13 February 2013

This one works, although tab doesn't seem to do anything. Pretty cool! Also, how about separating the source and binary into two separate zip files?

Skilgannon09:14, 14 February 2013
 

Great! Thanks for testing. I will have separate downloads (more than two :-)), this was just a quick export to see if it worked on Windows 7 / other people's computers. Thx for feedback on tab navigation, I need to figure that out - I've otherwise put a lot of care into good keyboard navigation / shortcuts, so that's a must-fix.

Voidious15:13, 14 February 2013
 
 
 

That is understandable. In that case it should be fine. As long as you are not using the Windows 8 only apis (which do exist!). But from the soudns of it, you're not. Since I don't think MinGW supports any of that yet.

Chase03:33, 2 February 2013