Can i ask you to have a look at ....

Hehe the formatting style discussion i know all to well :). I have no problem if you reformat it to whatever you think is appropriate, i'm used to read all kind of code style (working on it is another discussion :) ). I don't know if you develop with eclipse but if so, just give me your formatting file and we will see how it works :). I started programming when all these formatting rules made sense (80x40 terminals). You wouldn't come far with braces at there own line and lines over 80 chars but these days are long long gone :) and with todays monitor resolutions i don't see why i shouldn't use it. I'm surprised that you still have discussions on code style at work. We had some check in format at work and every one had to use it before checking in files to cvs. If you check out the files, just format it to whatever you like and thats it. Maybe i can convince you to give up the 80 char per line rule, because with all these method().method().method() calls it is quite hard to maintain a readable code line. Well, like said format to whatever you think is good :).

If it comes to changes, don't hold you back do whatever you want (in your branch or in mine no matter). This Git stuff is way more fail resistant to merges than cvs/subversion and i have no doubt that i can handle the changes. The code right now is still draft status and i haven't looked where i could bring some things together or should more open and bring it apart. I just wanted to bring it to life and start the improvements from there. I'm thinking of changing the communication anyway to RMI or TCP but for now i'm fine with the process in/out like you did. It's also ready to take a GUI (but thats not really something i'm thinking of right now). I'm not sure if i have the dynamic stuff included right now i guess it is still in another project but i think i will bring it over within the next couple of updates.

Reading about Diamonds start positions made me think if it would be rewarding to use the start position feature of the RoboCodeEngine. This would give you the opportunity to set all kind of interesting start positions and just rumble it out.

I basically use the default Oracle/Sun format and style guide, just with 2-space tabs (no real tabs). 2-space tabs makes 80 char lines a lot more reasonable, too. I generally don't auto-format because some stuff is still a judgement call, like breaking lines in the clearest way.

I certainly learned a long time ago that code style is just something you have to compromise on to get anything done in a collaborative setting. =) I didn't quite realize I’d become so accustomed to one Java code style until browsing your code. And yeah, I was also surprised at first that code style was so enforced at my current job. It was an adjustment after having the exact opposite situation at my previous job (just stay consistent within a given file). But now I like it, and/or am brainwashed. At a large enough company with a lot of code sharing, it kind of makes sense to just settle on something. Deep down I’m not actually a psycho about code style, but maybe keeping it consistent within each package makes sense, and wouldn't be too painful for either of us.