0.20.0

[flemming-n-larsen]

📦 0.20.0 - Added support for teams and droids - 23-Aug-2023

🚀 Improvements

• Team support:
  • Added support for teams, where a team is a group of bots that work together to battle against other teams (or bots). Each team member can communicate with the other teammates, which is crucial to share information and coordinate movement and attacks.
• Droid interface:
  • A Droid interface was added that turns a bot into a droid bot, which has no radar but has 120 initial energy points instead of the normal 100 starting points. The droid is intended for team bots.
• Sample Bots:
  • MyFirstTeam has been added to demonstrate how to set up a team.
  • MyFirstLeader is a team bot that has been added to demonstrate a (leader) bot that is responsible for scanning enemy bots and sending the coordinates of the current target, to fire at, to the teammates.
  • MyFirstDroid is a team bot that is a droid, and hence comes with no radar, and relies entirely on the MyFirstLeader to send data about which target coordinate to fire at.
• Bot API:
  • Added the TeamMessageEvent which is received when another team member has sent a message.
  • Added these new methods to support teams:
    • getTeammateIds() to get the ids of all teammates in a team.
    • isTeammate(botId) to check if a bot with a specific id is a teammate or opponent.
    • broadcastTeamMessage(message) broadcasts a message to all team members.
    • sendMessage(botId, message) sends a message to a specific team member.
    • onMessageReceived(TeamMessageEvent) is an event handler to take action when a team message is received.
  • Added the Droid interface (no scanner, but 120 initial energy points).
• Booter:
  • Updated to support booting teams besides bots.
  • Changed the name of the run command into boot.
  • Changed command option -T into -g for filtering game rules (-t is now used for the team-only option).
  • Added --botsOnly and corresponding -b option flag for filtering on bots only (excluding teams).
  • Added --teamsOnly and corresponding -t option flag for filtering on teams only (excluding bots).
• GUI:
  • Added Directory Filter dropdown to filter on bots and teams.
  • The results window now aggregates scores for teams as well as bots and got a wider "Name" column. Some column names were changed, and tooltips were added to fields containing values/scores.
• Schema:
  • Renamed bot-results-for-bot and bot-results-for-observer into results-for-bot and results-for-observer as participants now include teams and not just bots.

🪲 Bug Fixes

• GUI:
  • The GUI could get stuck and become unresponsive when displaying the busy pointer.

📄 Documentation

You can read the Robocode Tank Royale documentation here.

🔨 Try it out

Please head over to My First Bot tutorial to learn how to set up your first bot for Robocode Tank Royale.

▶ Running Robocode

You need Java 11 as a minimum or newer, e.g. the newest version of Java available.

You can read the installation guide to get more details about installing both Java and Robocode.

The main application is the GUI Application, which is a Java application.
You can read more about how to use the GUI Application here.

The Robocode GUI application is run from the command line (shell or command prompt) in order to start and view
battles:

java -jar robocode-tankroyale-gui-0.20.0.jar

If you are new to Robocode, you need to download some bots and extract those to directories on your system.
These bot directories can be added from the menu of the GUI: Config → Bot Root Directories

🤖 Sample bots

These sample bots are currently available:

Platform	Archive	Requirements
C#	sample-bots-csharp-0.20.0.zip	Microsoft .Net SDK 5.0 or newer
Java	sample-bots-java-0.20.0.zip	Any Java SDK 11 or newer

All bots are put in zip archives, which should be installed in independent directories.
Each zip archive contains a ReadMe.md file with more information for the specific platform.

📦 Bot API

In order to start developing bots for Robocode, the following APIs are available.

📦 Java:

Available as:

• Jar file: robocode-tankroyale-bot-api-0.20.0.jar
• Artifact at Nexus Repository
• Artifact at Maven Central Repository (available after some time)

📦 .Net:

Available as:

• Artifact at Nuget repository

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This discussion was created from the release 0.20.0.