FightCodeGame ?
The highlighted comment was created in this revision.
Anyone checked out http://fightcodegame.com/ ? The web site seems pretty sleek and it all looks pretty active and well organized. After watching some sample battles, and that the #1 ranked bot is ~350 lines of code, I have to wonder how high a ceiling there is in terms of writing sophisticated robots. The gameplay looks pretty much like a Robocode (or whatever predecessor) clone with only blocking API calls.
It kind of annoys me, on principle, that I have to authorize it with my GitHub account even to see things that are read-only, like the rankings. So I haven't done that yet and thus haven't looked into it in much depth.
Well I have never had much success with normal Robots. Mostly since it seemed like a lot of extra effort for little gain. That is, the rumble was dominated by AdvancedRobots and their non-blocking calls.
I took a look at it, and it is difficult (for me) to write a decent robot on it. Mostly because I would like some kind of debug feature. Supposedly it has a log function to write to a console. But I can't figure out how to access said console.
I played a different Javascript / web-based programming game and also had problems with that aspect. I think it's the browser Javascript console that you need to look at.
(And it was crashing my browser / useless to me for a while before I realized I'd printed like 30k lines to it, which it isn't really designed for, and finally figured out how to clear it.)
After a bit more work I had a semi workable robot, but I don't think we will be able to apply anything more then rudimentary robocode knowledge to the game.
You're joking? Hah, wow.
Now we just need to make a port of Girl. Which I think is still the highest ranking extends Robot.
Heh. :-) Pretty cool to see sample.Walls in action in a different game.
Down to #45 now: [1] Seeing as the battles are 1 round and I think it may take some manual action to run battles, the rankings may be a couple orders of magnitude less stable than what we're used to with the RoboRumble.
That #13 place was a stream of lucky battles. Ran some more battles later and the rating kept oscilating between 1485 and 1525.
You can also choose whom to fight against and manipulate your rating by choosing only opponents with high PBI, but I avoided it.
My impressions of FightCode:
The API is simpler than "extends Robot" in Robocode.
No energy drop when firing and the gun and bullets are still invisible to radar. So, no way to detect incoming bullets. But you can assume a bunch of tick-head-on bullets.
No independent radar axis, the radar is always pointing to the same direction the gun is.
No velocity and heading in scans, making even linear targeting a challenge.
No "scan()" method, making bots miss a lot of scans, even when there is a sitting duck in front of their guns. I had to hack Walls code a bit to improve scans, but it is still missing a lot of them. And it is a key strategy in Walls to avoid being crushed by opponents close to walls, like Corners.
I wonder how a rambot will perform there. Since it is hard to keep track of opponents due to limited radar, and the only thing which works together with "ahead()" is "fire()", a bot moving and shooting straight forward can do a lot of damage.
