Starting your own LiteRumble

Does anyone have some advice for starting up a custom and/or private LiteRumble? I've got a new batch of programming students that I'm leading through Robocode and I'd love to run a custom bracket with just my kids in it as I've done in years past.

Sure, it's easy enough.

1. Create your own app on Google AppEngine
2. Download and extract the code from bitbucket
3. Change the app name in app.yaml to the name of the app you created
4. Download and install the Google AppEngine python SDK
5. Run the following in the code directory: appcfg.py update . && appcfg.py update batchratings.yaml
6. This should give you an empty LiteRumble instance running on your app

Once you have a copy of LiteRumble running, all you need to do is modify the rumble client in roborumble.txt to point to your new server for uploads. You also need a new participants list, which you can host on appengine too if you don't mind continually re-deploying, or you can make a wiki page somewhere. The client just parses everything between the two <pre> tags.

Have fun!

Excellent. I can just host participants on a Dropbox text file. Thanks for the info!

By the way, a favorite thing I do when introducing my kids to Robocode is to have a pair of them (driver and gunner) pilot sample.Interactive at a moderate simulation speed against some sample bots until they get used to it. Then they face DrussGT. Thought you'd want to know that you've caused some laughter and groans of frustration from some prospective high school coders!

Brilliant. I've always found the sample.Interactive very difficult to control, I don't think I'd stand a chance against DrussGT =) I bet if I set the bullet colour to something more similar to the background it would make it even harder for interactive users >:-D