Talk:SilverSurfer

Well, SilverSurfer, has been an issue recently. Since 1.6.0 the Robocode engine has tightened up on what classes bots can access a bit, only them to use the classes that are meant to be part of the bot API. This has caused SilverSurfer which has misused robocode.exceptions.DisabledException, causing all Rumble clients newer than 1.6.0 to give SilverSurfer a score of 0 always which has unfairly killed SilverSurfer's rank. Now I think there are three solutions to this:

• Axe comes back and makes a new release
• We remove SilverSurfer from the rumble
• or one of us makes an 'unofficial' SilverSurfer release to replace the one currently in rumble.

I have already implemented the third solution partially, importing the SilverSurfer code into Eclipse and replacing DisabledException with RuntimeException. I also needed to remove the robocodeGL code and remove some debugging code in order to get it to build (some debugging classes referenced in the code but unsed in the release aren't with the source), but it should be functionally the same. So my question to people is this, do you think it would be reasonable to make an unofficial release of SilverSurfer that fixes this? --Rednaxela 23:24, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

You have my vote on the third option. SilverSurfer still is a top-20 bot despite its age and it would be a loss if we remove it from the rumble. As I think that the chance of Axe becoming active again is quite small, I say complete your 'refitting' and release it. --GrubbmGait 11:51, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Third option, go for it! But this brings up another point, should new versions of Robocode make these old bots throw exceptions? --Skilgannon 13:20, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, "axeBots.SilverSurfer 2.53.33fix" is now up. That should fix it. As far as that other point: Well, I'd say that new versions normally shouldn't, however this was a case was a bit different. As this code SilverSurfer referenced wasn't part of the robot API, there wasn't really any guarantee it would keep working in future versions anyways. --Rednaxela 01:47, 14 December 2008 (UTC)