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News
November 28th 2000
There is as small change in the ending date of the challenge: the results of the November 2000 Jrobots Challenge will be published on December 1st.
November 25th 2000
We are only in the middle of the November 2000 Jrobots Challenge, but we can already draw some conclusions:
- The number of players and robots increased a lot in the last two weeks. We now have about fourty robots in the arena and some of them are very well designed. This means that this game has great potentials and it has at least a little appeal for programmers
- For the first time I've seen a robot (Fish) that performs very well in all the three categories. Its strategy changes a lot in the three types of play and its author (BingleFish) realized all this in only 5089 bytes (say 31 bytes below the class size limit)
- Next challenge must be greater than this one because it's the Second Millennium Jrobots Final Challenge, so...
... what can I do to make this game better than ever?
- Do you want to increase the class size (say 10 Kb) to facilitate the development of complex strategies?
- Do you want to allow more than one Java class for each robot?
- Do you want to use selected classes of the Java API?
- Other?
On the mailing-list you can find a few messages about these topics, but I need more feedback to make the good thing and to improve this game.
Please, send your opinions to the mailing-list or directly in my mail-box. Thank you in advance.
November 21st 2000
Thanks to all the players the November 2000 Jrobots Challenge is really great! There are a lot of new and combative robots and the greatest of all is still Fish. It's the first robot that could win all the three categories in the history of Jrobots.
Remember that this challenge is a great test for the Second Millennium Jrobots Final Challenge (in December 2000). The winners of that contest will be the best robots of the last millennium :)
Jrobots is a beautiful game if all the players collaborate to its good working, so please...
- Upload only robots you wrote yourself. Robots adopting usual techniques are welcome, but avoid to send the sample robots without modifying them
- Upload whatever robot you like, but don't send too many robots (four for every author is enough)
- Test your robots in the off-line arena and only when they work fine send them in the on-line one
Thank you all for the collaboration!
November 20th 2000
The November 2000 Jrobots Challenge runs! You can send your robots even in the course of the challenge, so you're not too late.
The latest robots are stored in the file jjrobots_challengers.zip. You can download it to test off-line the behaviour of your robot against the other challengers. This file will be updated periodically, however you can visit the downloads page to check the upload date of the robots in the arena.
Good luck to all the players!
November 18th 2000
I'm writing an anti-Fish robot. I've named it Shark, but this was not enough to win against it :)
I think that the circling technique introduced by Fish is a good one. It reduces the damages of the missiles fired by strong and weak robots. So Shark runs in the nearest corner and start circling, but this is not enough to make it a strong robot due to the poor fire technique. I'll try to improve it, but...
in a few days the new challenge will start!
I hope that the development of your robots is more advanced than mine.
To download Shark use the applet in the Downloads section.
November 13th 2000
A new author (BingleFish) has sent a great robot called Fish. It's really a very very STRONG robot! I think it's the robot we must absolutely beat to win the next challenge, but we need to work hard to get some chance.
To download Fish use the applet in the Downloads section.
November 11th 2000
It's going to start the... November 2000 JRobots Challenge (November 20th-30th).
There is only a new rule: robots below the 50% of victories-matches in
all the types of play are removed from the arena at the end of the
challenge.
Yes, this is a game for diehard people.
November 10th 2000
I'm proud to announce that Jrobots: Java Programming Battles is now hosted by CFXweb (demos and games development).
I want to thank Civax for his suggestions. Now the site is more appealing and I hope to start a new season of great challenges for this game.
Before CFXweb
Now you can find Jrobots on CFXweb, but it was born months before its first appearing here on November 2000. Even its name changed over time: Once Jrobots: Java Programming Battles was called simply JJRobots and long before JavaJousters (the latter name is still used for the mailing-list).
Fortunately, you can't find any more the old site ;->, but it is useful to remember some important old events:
June 1st 2000
JJRobots was rated by JARS (Java Applet Rating Service)
as a TOP 25% applet. Visit JARS for more details.
April 1st 2000
The first on-line contest of JJRobots started. You can read the results of that contest (and the placements of the other non-CFXweb challenges) at the Jrobots Challanges page.
March 15th 2000
The server CGIs of JJRobots were turned on: Players were able to upload their robots and the server began to save the results of the on-line tournaments.
March 1st 2000
After a long period of Java threads tuning and bugs fixing, the applet of JJRobots was uploaded to the original site for test pourposes.
December 24th 1999
The first stable version of JavaJousters (aka JJRobots) executed the first off-line tournament. The winner was Sniper, followed by Counter, Rook and, finally, Rabbit.
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