BerryBots updates

Back at this and the replay support's almost ready. Now with ship/stage output consoles, video player controls, and results at the end! [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Still a few loose ends and optimizing to be done. (And I think Linux/FireFox, the combo specifically, is still screwed up.)

Some things I'm really excited about:

• The data collection is pretty fast and low overhead, so I can leave it on all the time in the engine. Last I checked it was a ~5% performance hit, which seems worth it.
• You'll be able to save replays from the Game Runner API. So for anomalous results, you can save the replay (which includes your output console). Like right now I have a 99.7% success rate on Laser Gallery and need to figure out what's up in those 3 of 1000 cases.
• Long term: I'd like to have a web app that lets you select a stage, some sample bots, input Lua code for your own bot, submit form to run match headless in the cloud, and view replay in the browser.

And man, now that I'm testing this with the Game Runner API, I am just salivating. You can run a tourney or a benchmark and literally save every replay to watch later without any problem, besides maybe disk space. (Looks like ~100 bytes per tick in these 1v1 matches I just ran. So 10,000 ticks would be 1 meg.) How cool would it have been to have replays for every match in the Twin Duel every week when it was running?

Sorry to boast, just excited... :-)

I'm not sure I'll make the time, but I don't see any reason we couldn't add this same style of replay support to Robocode. All you really need is fast/native buffers to cache all the pertinent data during the match in a lazy/efficient way. Java has ByteBuffers. I re-tested and with BerryBots, it really is only a 5% performance penalty with trivial bots. And of course some memory, but not even that much. And once you have sophisticated bots, the engine itself is only a small % of overall CPU usage anyway.

There's still a fair amount of work in coalescing/parsing the data, saving it, tying it into the GUI and control API, writing the replay renderer and all that, but no major technical limitations I can see. The biggest obstacle for me would just be getting my build environment setup to build Robocode, which I've never done before. The Javascript rendering could probably be forked from BerryBots, too, instead of starting from scratch.