|
|
Visit the APOCALYX BLOG!
| |  |  | |  | | | | |
News
January 27th 2001
For the second time in the history of Jrobots a single robot won all the three categories: it's KillerBees again!
Still great are the veterans Epa1 and Pulse1, but they had no chance because thay failed to beat KillerBees even in the previous challenge.
A new entry is Marvin3: the author uploaded it in the last week and its placements are not valid, but it'll start the next challenge from the beginning so it has good chances in Single and Double Matches. It's a sin its weakness in Team Matches.
Some historycal robots were removed because they didn't reach the 50% victories-matches limit. This means that most of the robots are top-notch robots and challenges are more selective.
The robots fought a total amount of 8111 battles.
To see the results read the Challenges page.
Here is an abstract:
| Single Winner | KillerBees | by MontyFish | 92.06% |
|---|
| Double Winner | KillerBees | by MontyFish | 88.34% |
|---|
| Team Winner | KillerBees | by MontyFish | 64.53% |
|---|
Now you can upload your robots to win the February 2001 Jrobots Challenge aka KillerBees vs The Rest of The World 2nd Chance in honour of the second great result of KillerBees.
January 24th 2001
I've written a clearer page for the game in progress JerkFighters. There are five sections: Design, Physics Engine, AI Engine, 3D Engine and Download. In the last section you can find and download the pieces of code already available with the sources. Now there is only a small piece of the simulated Java Virtual Machine, but I'm going to upload more sources as soon as possible.
January 22nd 2001
Only five days to the end of the challenge. The results are quite stable and KillerBees is going to win its second challenge.
The new robot Marvin3 gets good results in Double Match, but it has no time to reach the 50% battles limit. It'll have best chances in the next challenge, but it needs to improve its Team Match performances.
On the JerkFighters side the physics engine is almost done, while the Java compiler is now abandoned in favour of a Java bytecode interpreter. More news soon.
January 16th 2001
I want to thank all the people that sent me messages in favour of Jrobots and Marvin who uploaded a robot the same day I said that Jrobots was dead :)
I find interesting that professional programmers or amateurs still play such old fashioned games (see tpga.virtualave.net for a list of other Crobots-like game available all over the world) and I think that the 3D dimension in this kind of games may be a step forward for an experience more and more involving.
I hope that the JerkFighters game is the right answer: the development page is now opened.
January 15th 2001
KillerBees killed Jrobots! In the first week of the current challenge there are very few robots and none of them can remove KillerBees from the top of the list.
This is the end of Jrobots? I hope not, but it's really difficult to write a better robot for veteran and new authors. This could explain the shortening of new robots and new versions of older ones. I know: it's a difficult task to develop a robot better than the three-categories winner of the latest millennium ;->.
To improve the game I have two ideas: - Develop a new game
I'm going to open a new page about the next step of Jrobots. The name of the new game is JerkFighters and it is going to be a rather "physical" fight among complex robots. The concept is similar to Jrobots but I think that JerkFighters is going to be more complex and more interesting. This game is born from the ashes of Jrobots3D: the threads of the robots work worse than ever with a Java 3D engine running in the background, so I dropped it :(
The news-page about JerkFighters is an idea I get to quicken my slooowww-coding speed.
- Release the source code
Some people asked me the source code of the simulator of Jrobots: now it's available. You can find it in the downloads page. The source code hasn't many comments, so feel free to send me any question if you need any explanation. I hope that your suggestion can help me to write a better simulator, but remember that every piece of code is there for good reasons and adding or removing parts couldn't be a good idea (for security reasons, performance issues and so on).
January 8th 2001
Here is the KillerBees vs The Rest of The World Challenge. I hope that some author can write a new robot that make head against KillerBees, I failed in doing it :(
Remember that 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!
| | | | |  | |  | | | |
|
