Tron 3.11 seems broken in current Robocode/Java versions?
I'm unsure why, but I'm noticing that Tron 3.11 is currently broken under Robocode 1.9.4.2 and OpenJDK 11. It seems to always start up in "Reference" or "Challenge" mode, never in "Normal" mode. This is the reason for Tron's recent underperformance against updated/new rumble entrants. Need to figure out the cause of this. There's a good chance this could point to a regression in Robocode.
UPDATE: Confirmed that Tron is working fine in 1.9.3.9 and 1.9.4.1, but not in Robocode 1.9.4.2. This is unfortunate and I doubt Tron is truly the only bot affected.
Looks like there's some incompatible change in the logic of robot name in 1.9.4.2, and anything depend on that is broken to some degree. This frequently happens to bots with Team capacity.
Every single bot now receives a "($i)" suffix where i is absolute index of all robots. The suffix was only added to bots with same name and was related to the specific bot. This change breaks the way most Team bots know which is leader. Team battles should be completely broken now, so does some of the bots with Team capacity.