Problem Running RoboRunner

I'm finally at the point where I am trying to actually launch RoboRunner. Currently running into an error I will have to debug. Posting part of the stack trace here in case anyone wants to comment.

Copying missing bots... 0 JAR copies done!
Initializing engine: robocodes\z1... Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.NullPointerException
	at robowiki.runner.BattleRunner.initEngine(BattleRunner.java:66)
	at robowiki.runner.BattleRunner.<init>(BattleRunner.java:42)
	at robowiki.runner.RoboRunner.<init>(RoboRunner.java:172)
	at org.xandercat.roborunner.runner.RoboRunnerService.startRunner(RoboRunnerService.java:44)
	at org.xandercat.roborunner.runner.action.LaunchRoboRunnerAction.actionPerformed(LaunchRoboRunnerAction.java:46)
	at javax.swing.AbstractButton.fireActionPerformed(Unknown Source)

And the chunk of relevant code from RoboRunner:

      System.out.print("Initializing engine: " + enginePath + "... ");
      ProcessBuilder builder = new ProcessBuilder(command);
      builder.redirectErrorStream(true);
      Process battleProcess = builder.start();
      BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(
          new InputStreamReader(battleProcess.getInputStream()));
      String processOutput;
      do {
        processOutput = reader.readLine();
      } while (!processOutput.equals(BattleProcess.READY_SIGNAL));
      System.out.println("done!");
      _processQueue.add(battleProcess);

Presumably, the input stream never provided the BattleProcess.READY_SIGNAL. I'll have to do some digging to figure out why. I'm not entirely clear on what the RoboRunner requirements are, but at the moment I am running it under Java 6 with Robocode 1.7.3.0.

FYI -- line 66 is the while part of the do/while loop.

I'll take a deeper look later when I'm home. At a glance, it seems like processOutput is coming up null - maybe the condition should be "processOutput != null && ...". What command are you using to launch this?

Looks like the problem was I didn't have one of the needed Robocode jars in the classpath. Thanks for including source in the RoboRunner jar; that made debugging easier.

Fixing the classpath fixed the problem I was having. Also, I am running RoboRunner via new RoboRunner(...) and then calling the runBattles() method. I need to dig a little deeper to determine how best to extract the battle results; at the moment it is just letting RoboRunner barf them on System.out. :-)

One thing is for sure -- it runs oodles faster than RoboResearch. I'm definitely switching. I suppose it may have been possible to branch RoboResearch to run battles a la RoboRunner, but I'm having fun building a new UI, so I'm continuing on.

Cool, good to hear! I don't think I kept any real test results of speed vs RoboResearch, but I think it was in the range of 20% less time for my bot / system. The smart battles stuff helps too, but it's hard to measure.

Similarly, I had long wanted to update RoboResearch to use the control API instead of launching external Java processes. When I started digging into it, it just looked easier / better / more fun to rewrite from scratch.