February 26th 2001
Now in the JerkFighters page you can find a list of the tools (engines and libraries) used in the development of this DirectX game.
February 24th 2001
KillerBees won all the three categories for the third time in the history of Jrobots. This is not a novelty :)
Marvin3 was uploaded too late in the January Challenge, but now it has the possibility to reach the third place in Double play. It's still a sin its weakness in Team Matches.
The two new robots of this month were Grunt and Dragon. I think that Grunt was the weakest robot ever seen in the arena (apart a Rabbit uploaded for mistake last year). It's the only robot that didn't reach the 50%-50%-25% limit this month.
Dragon is still under development and this explains its poor results in Double and Team play, but it's an improvement respect my old series. As you can notice my Platoon, Phalanx, Stinger and Sharks are now the last four robots in Single play, this means that it's time to choose a new movement pattern as Dragon does.
The robots fought a total amount of 10114 battles.
To see the results read the Challenges page.
Here is an abstract:
| Single Winner | KillerBees | by MontyFish | 88.19% |
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| Double Winner | KillerBees | by MontyFish | 86.35% |
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| Team Winner | KillerBees | by MontyFish | 64.47% |
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Now you can upload your robots to win the March 2001 Jrobots Challenge aka KillerBees Forever. Yes, I think that no one is going to beat KillerBees for a long time. It's really the state of the art in the Jrobots programming technology!
The speed of the simulations of the new challenge will run in real time to leave more think time to the robots. The smartest robots will be favoured and I hope to see some changes in the result.
February 21st 2001
There are no great news about Jrobots. The last challenge shows no significative changes in the placement list and the uploaded robots where too much weak to reach the 50% limit and survive. There are still few days to improve something, but I think it's too late.
Waiting for some innovative author, I want to favour smart robots slowing down the simulation speed of the next challenge from x4 to x1, the simulations will run in real time leaving more thinking time to the robots. Oh, I forgot... the title of the next challenge is KillerBees Forever :)
More interesting news about JerkFighters. This game was born to improve the design of Jrobots, but the people visiting CFXweb (the site about Game and Demo Development that hosts Jrobots: Java Programming Battles) ask for something more. This means that JerkFighters will be no longer designed as an on-line Java applet, but it will became a real game for the DirectX platform with full use of 3D graphics and hardware acceleration. I think this is not a good news for Jrobots players, but beginners game programmers asked for this change of design. More details in the JerkFighters page soon.
February 4th 2001
A message sent to the mailing-list by WalterNistico moved me to tears. I was resigned to the fate of Shark because it was my weakest robot and a mistake in the rules of the last challenge put it out of the arena. In addition I lost its source code in a hard-disk crash some weeks ago. The words of the author of KillerBees made me change idea, so I reverse engineered my own class file of Shark, made some changes and now... Sharks are back!
Well, they are weak as before, but more beautiful than ever. Shark was born to kill Fish, but it failed, so now the Sharks circle in the lower corners of the arena... about a half a mile away from the starting area of Fish :)
To read the comments of WalterNistico visit the page In Defence of the Original Robots. Those words made me remember why I love Jrobots.
February 3rd 2001
The February 2001 Jrobots Challenge starts now. Will someone succeed in beating KillerBees? I think not and I'm planning to call the next challenge KillerBees Forever :)
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, but you can visit the downloads page to check the upload date of the robots in the arena.
To read the results in real-time simply visit the Battle Applet page
Good luck to all the players!
