EvBot

Hey, a quick request with EvBot, could you only have one version in the rumble at a time? If you want to compare their scores you can do that in the details page.

Also, just a suggestion, you will get stable rumble results quicker if you make EvBot execute faster. Right now it runs quite slowly, and while that *is* allowed, it makes testing quite a bit more painful ;-)

I removed the second entry and apologize for such misbehavior.

Can you suggest a tool to test my bot offline? I use RoboRunner, but I see its result different from robocode graphical interface, and even then it is different for paint on/off cases. I am guessing it is doe to the fact that my bot is super slow, and has more skipped turns in no gui environment.

Don't worry about the second one, lots of people do that when they're starting out. It's just better to have one so the rankings don't get as full, and "top 100" actually means "top 100" etc...

Yeah, that sounds like you're dealing with skipped turns problems. RoboRunner should give you similar results to the main RoboRumble (at least, in pair-on-pair scores). If you minimise the graphical interface do the results look similar to what you're getting with RoboRunner? Also, make sure you aren't running too many simultaneous threads in RoboRunner, if you're running more threads than cores it can impact skipped turns pretty heavily.

Why don't you make a page for EvBot where you explain what your general strategy is, we might be able to help you with getting it to run faster and avoiding the skipped turn problems.

It's also worth noting you can always revert back to a previous version in the rumble and it retains all its battles. And you can compare to previous versions forever. So you don't lose much by having only 1 version at a time on the participants list.

Nice to hear you use RoboRunner! :-) +1 to what Skilgannon said about those issues. But it's also true that there's almost no replacement for entering your bot in the rumble, so don't stress too much about posting versions frequently. Unless you've got quite a few cores to throw at Robocode, you'll get more battles in the rumble, and you may get slightly different scores on different machines / JVMs too.

Guys, thanks for your suggestions. My windows manager does not has a minimize button so I am unable to see the difference with minimized robocode. But I remove my slow code and everything seems to be way more predictable. The slow code is a pif gun with which I step in all beginners pitfalls myself.

Voidious, I have a suggestion for RoboRunner installer. Do not copy robots folder, just link to it if you think it is a must. At first I was shocked how long the initialization was performed and then I saw 500MB directory for each thread.

The whole separate "robots" directory thing is not for no reason: In order to avoid conflicts between the running instances, I'm pretty sure one needs a separate "robot.database" file, and separate ".data" directory inside it. Unless I'm missing something, without modifying the robocode engine a little there's probably no way to do that with (sym)links, except by creating a link for each and every jar file, which would be a touch silly in some ways.

To improve that without symlink-spam I see one of two possible approaches:

1. Modify the robocode engine to separate the "robot.database" and ".data" directories from
2. Modify the robocode engine so it'll read jar files nested in a folder in the "robots" directory (thus allowing a simple symlink to a central robots directory)

For this purpose, personally I'd lean toward the first option simply because symlink APIs/commands are slightly less cross-platform (though I'd personally also not mind #2 supported for other reasons)

Doh! Sorry about that Beaming. The script is a little quick and dirty compared to what it could be. I haven't touched RoboRunner in a while, but I'll take a look when I get a chance.

@Rednaxela - It's true you need separate robots directories for each install, but I can indeed fix the issue Beaming describes with a more sophisticated shell script. The RoboRunner setup script just uses "cp -r" to clone X copies of whatever Robocode install you point it at, which means it makes X copies of the robots dir. But when using RoboRunner, it copies bots as needed from the "bots" directory into the Robocode installs, so it would be fine to leave them empty during setup.

I think it is sufficient to make an empty robots dir for each thread to be run and add the robots directory location from the master copy to botsDirs variable in the roborunner.properties file. It is hinted in one of the readme, but took me a while to understand that this is sufficient.

On first run engine will recreate robot.database for each of the threads.