Talk:DeltaSquad

Problems Running Teams

So I've been having some problems running teams in robocode. When I create a team and go to run it I get something like:

Aborting battle, could not find robot: /home/brian/robocode/robotskid.team.Boss
Aborting battle, could not find robot: /home/brian/robocode/robotskid.team.Fixer
Aborting battle, could not find robot: /home/brian/robocode/robotskid.team.Sev
Aborting battle, could not find robot: /home/brian/robocode/robotskid.team.Scorch

The funny thing is that those robots aren't even located in /home/brian/robocode/robots, they're off in my eclipse workspace. Anyone else have this problem? Know how to fix it? Could it be a bug in robocode? -- KID 14:58, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Which robocode version do you use? I know some version of robocode have this bug, but I think it is fixed. (bug report) I it is not, then report it :-) » Nat | Talk » 23:50, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Virtual Combat

Hey cool, and looks like you're #1 and undefeated so far? Nice job! =) And good luck! --Voidious 23:31, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, dude! I'm trying not to let my head get to big right now as there is still a lot of time in phase 1, but I am still going to enjoy my time at the top. :-) Seeing as I was never able to make it there here... --KID 04:48, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Congratulations to KID (and I think his father), DeltaSquad is the champion of virtual combat. The finals were a tough winner of 2 out of 3 matches against my team, Untouchable, and even when my team had previously beaten DeltaSquad a good number of times. DeltaSquad much more robust team crushed Untouchable to ashes for an amazing and well deserved championship win. Congrats again, since day one I knew your's was the only team that would really put up a challenge and have been waiting for the finals against you ever since. Good job. (Battles can be watched at http://codefest.org.in/vc-tournament.php) --zyx 17:23, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Wow, cool to hear you guys ended up #1 and #2! I checked up on the results a few times and saw Untouchable had overtaken DeltaSquad, but had no idea zyx was behind it. Congrats to you both! It would be cool to read any thoughts you guys want to share about the experience. Was the rule set interesting enough to inspire a new tournament or rumble format here at the RoboWiki? Or just revive any interest in normal team battles or Twin Duel? --Voidious 18:05, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I think the basics of the rules are interesting enough to make a branch, however, they need a lot of polishing to make the battles more intense. Sometimes they are too short and luck plays a huge role, luck is always important in Robocode, but there were times it was too much. Another problem is that I think they built the system on a relatively unstable version of the base code, I don't how hard or easy is to use their extension in a more stable version of Robocode. For me it also gave enough encouragement to finally write a team bot, so hopefully I will sometime write an eternal rumble team. However, I am so time constrained right now that I even had to hide this tournament from my significant other and code late at night so she wouldn't know, I sort of put university work aside for the moment. As soon as my schedule frees I will however retake my Robocode addiction to some degree :), I just love it. I drifted, summarizing, I really think the capture the flag mode is interesting enough to have a tournament based on it, but lots of work is still needed to make it as stable and fair as the current eternal rumble is. About TwinDuel, I think is great, but I am a mega bot author, I can't really write anything adequate in a codesize restrained environment. --zyx 18:30, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Luck did play a lot into the competition, which I very much did not like, but in some respects it is the same in Robocode. Good starting locations can be a huge factor in who wins a melee battle for example. When competitions are based solely off single battle results and not off multiple battles the final results, in my opinion, cannot be trusted. I still believe that if a rating were to be assigned to both DeltaSquad and Untouchable like in the rumble, Untouchable would come out on top. I think, as you said yourself zyx, being robust is about the only thing that DeltaSquad has over Untouchable. --KID 04:16, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you sir! I thought for sure you would take the final win. I thought I might sneak out a win with just one battle but thought for sure you would take me with the best of 3. I also got really scared after FideeTeam beat me during the tournament... Yes, it was my dad, but he just joined because I thought you had to have two people to have a team. :-P

Eheh, we were surprised to beat you there! We had indeed good improovements during the contest, thanks to a better movement especially. I noticed you did not "risk" to change your team for the semi-finals and finals, was a smart choice. We decided to risk some improovements, but that was not enough (as we had some little problems in catching the flag, in fact). Anyway, the contest was great and really fun! --Davidecassenti 19:55, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I thought the competition was awesome! It was really cool to throw in the two new things of capture the flag and obstacles. In my mind, the later brought the most fun initially, but the combination of the two created a huge path-finding challenge in the end. I never did put any of my experiments in the field but was working on them throughout the entire competition. I would love to hear how zyx worked on these new elements and would be willing to share all my source code as usual.

As far as adding new competitions to the rumble, I think it would be fun and definitely revived my interest, but the actual program needs some work and maybe even some of the rules adjusted a little bit. The program stalled every once in a while, the pause didn't work after a flag was returned, and some other things I don't remember. While I thought only getting the closest point was a cool way to work the obstacles, the angle and distance made the points really inconsistent. Something to consider at least. Just my thoughts.

--KID 18:32, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Just to address the problem you faced: original codebase of this tournament (which is custom-battlefield branch in Robocode SVN) is extremely unstable. The obstacle and other API isn't synchronised into the Roboccode core correctly, and it is based on early Robocode 1.7. At least two or three developers are brainstorming and working on this branch of Robocode.

Congratulations too! This area of Robocode is really unexplored. This tournament really did bring new light into Robocode. --Nat Pavasant 02:23, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I do realize that it was based off a branch of an earlier version of Robocode and am in no way "complaining," just pointing out some areas that needed work if this were to ever be streamlined. I do believe that if some work was put into updating it to recent versions we could have a very fun new game play for Robocode. --KID 04:16, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Congrats! It's interesting to see how this went! Like Voidious, I also checked up on it a few times and Untouchable doing well, but unaware it was zyx. --Rednaxela 03:08, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I knew that he had to be from the wiki as soon as he started beating me! :-P --KID 04:16, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I knew DeltaSquad's author was from the wiki as soon as hi spun his radar, it wasn't a simple Double.POSITIVE_INFINITY. Somehow I read "robotikdude" as "robotkiddude" and immediately thought of KID. Mostly because when I started robocoding I downloaded bots randomly, two impressed me deeply Shadow and Gladiator, so I have always considered KID one of the reasons I fully joined Robocode. --zyx 13:09, 16 March 2011 (UTC)