Chronicle of 2017

RoboWiki isn't dead! Here's what happened this year:

• January 1, 2017 ‒ Robocode 1.9.2.6 released. No feature changes.
• July 8 ‒ Firestarter by Cb was released and almost immediately jumped to 2nd place in the MeleeRumble. At this rate, it may soon take the melee throne.
• August 18 – LiteRumble was briefly broken and quickly fixed.
• August 20 ‒ Xor fixed a bug in fromHell.BlackBox_0.0.2.jar that was preventing it from being ranked in the RoboRumble. It took 14th place.
• August 23 – The wiki was spammed. See discussions here, here, here, and here. The wiki was cleaned up by GrubbmGait, Chase-san, and Voidious.
• August 28 – SimpleBot by Xor entered the top 30 in general 1v1 RoboRumble.
• August 29 – Roborio by rsalesc entered the top 30.
• August 30 – Roborio ranked at #11 in APS and #5 in Survival (!!)
• September 3-8 – There were discussions on the wiki (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) about Java versions, skipped turns, MoxieBot bugs, forced robot stops, RoboRumble clients, CPU usage, time per turn, Robocode internals, Robocode versions, ThreadDeath exceptions, race conditions, dropped log messages, TPS sliders, CPU constants, thread sleeping, and timing mechanisms. At least one bug in Robocode was identified (and promptly patched).
• September 5 – GrubbmThree was updated. MaxRisk was reintroduced into the rumble.
• September 6-7 – An attempt to stabilize rankings and reduce load on RoboRumble clients by removing bots ranked lower than SittingDuck ironically led to a competition to create the worst-ranking robot possible. Current competitors include awful by Beaming, WorstBot by Xor, Retreat by Sheldor, and SuperSittingDuck by MN.
• September 12 – Monk by rsalesc entered the top 15 in MeleeRumble.
• September 13 – ScalarBot by Xor ranked at #9 in APS and #11 in survival.
• September 14-17 – A discussion about updating the GigaRumble led to the creation of its rumble config files, allowing the GigaRumble to be run for the first time in three years.
• September 16-27 – There were discussions on the wiki (Beaming's thread, Xor's page, discussion of Xor's page, Dsekercioglu's page, discussion of Dsekercioglu's page) about Maximum Escape Angle and the formulas used to calculate them.
• September 24 – After one month of continuous development and testing, GrubbmThree 0.9x outranked MaxRisk by 0.17 APS, 1.29 PWIN, and 0.39 Survival. It is now the best 1v1 rambot in the RoboRumble.
• September 27-October 3 – GrubbmGait updated the Rambot Challenge 2K6 results with new bots.
• September 28 – ScalarBot ascended to #6 in RoboRumble general 1v1!
• October 1 – Firestarter 1.10 by Cb is the new melee champion! And #14 in 1v1!
• October 2 – ScalarBot by Xor is now #3. No words can describe the impressiveness of this achievement.
• October 3-16 – Fnl began fixing bugs in Robocode, mostly related to Java 9, in preparation for a Robocode 1.9.3.0 release.
• October 14 – GrubbmGait began actively developing GresSuffurd after 5 years.
• October 16 – Firestarter reached #4 in 1v1 general after months of 1v1 tuning. GresSuffurd also reached #11.
• October 17 – Cb introduced FirestarterTeam, which had a tentative ranking of #2 in APS (below CombatTeam).
• October 17 – Robocode 1.9.3.0 ("The Java 9 support release") was released, with several bugfixes:
  • Too-low CPU constant calculation on Java 9 was worked around. (Bug-390)
  • Loading of robots from JARs within JARs (common for team JARs) was fixed on Java 9. (Bug-389)
  • A robot console logging race condition was fixed. (Bug-387)
  • Incorrect bullet collision in battles with ridiculously fast gun-cooling was repaired. (Bug-392)
  • A Java 9 warning about "illegal reflective access" was silenced. (Bug-386, Bug-391)
  • A UI exception in certain special team battles that flooded the Robocode console was fixed. (Bug-388)
• October 21, 2017 – Xor created a version of ScalarBot with 100% PWIN.