Bug?

Not sure if its a bug with RoboJogger, RoboRunner, or my robot. However I'm getting spurious results vs some bots.

For example vs Tron 2.01 in the TCRM challenge I'm getting an average of 87% percent when running 10 seasons manually, but in RoboJogger I'm getting an average of 61%.

I'm running Robojogger on the Mac, latest version of Robocode. I'm aware that Tron seems to be quite a slow bot, I was wondering if my bot was generating skipped turns for some reason as my bot is not too fast either. Notably in Robocode I am not generating any skipped turn events from what I can see. How do I access the Roborunner bot output? Is there a way or not?

Manually means running by hand in Robocode directly FYI incase it was unclear. :)

Oooh just saw there was a Robocode update that fixes some skipped turns, it literally came out today so I'm going to re-test with that and see what happens!

Tried the new Robocode version and I'm still getting the same result - running manually in Robocode gives a higher score by around 25% for my bot vs Tron compared to running in RoboJogger. :(

Are you sure you're using the same scoring mechanism? I know the TCs define score as TOTAL_BULLET_DAMAGE/ROUNDS.

Yes, the setup for the RoboRunner config file is using AVERAGE_BULLET_DAMAGE. Note that the results for all the other bots in the challenge look correct. It only appears to be vs Tron for some reason, which is why I postulated it was because Tron appears to be a slow bot which may cause skipped turns.

It might be because Tron starts firing - if it doesn't get its config file which puts it in TC mode copied correctly, for instance.

Yeah, I bet Tron is firing. Pretty dumb we don't just have a non-firing version in the TCRM downloads? Or do we? I remember doing that manually for a long time, anyway. Same with DT.

Bot output doesn't go anywhere in RoboRunner. Actually not exactly sure how to catch it but it would be a nice feature. You could log stuff to files though.

Try this: IBattleListener.onBattleMessage(BattleMessageEvent event)

Makes sense, but I checked the .data directory for tron for the 4 instances of RoboRunner that RoboJogger generates and all of them have a properties file with "challenger" set. :(

Oh, hmm. That sucks. 61 is a pretty unthinkably low score vs Tron, looking at the TCRM results. I guess it would be useful if RoboRunner/RoboJogger had a switch for displaying battles to help debug this kind of thing.

Can you try running battles manually from one of those Robocode instances?

Found the cause of the problem but im not sure why. Running Robocode from inside Eclipse means my robot doesn't get any Skipped Turn events, but running robocode from the robocode.sh file means my robot does get skipped turn events. That means two things:

1) There is a difference between running robocode from inside and outside eclipse 2) My robot is running dead slow (but mainly versus tron?!)

The second problem is something that I need to deal with, but the first is interesting. My command line arguments for running Robocode in Eclipse are "-Xmx512M -Dsun.io.useCanonCaches=false -Ddebug=true". Would this cause Robocode to ignore skipped turn events?

Yes, I believe setting debug=true disables skip turns. (Also turning on debugging graphics.)

-Ddebug=true does disable skipped turns, I checked the engine source. It is made exactly for that, so you can pause and trace execution step-by-step.

Ahhhh cheers problem found. I guess I need to look at optimising my bot. Unfortunately I've found that I can greatly increase its score versus a lot of bots by doing a lot more work. Sigh :(