The May 2004 JROBOTS Challenge ends now! As usual, the official results will be published on wednesday, June 2^nd. Now only just a few comments follow about this disastrous month of May.

After this long month that seems to never reach an end, I must apologize for all the inconveniences occurred to the players. The first two weeks were lost waiting for a reply from the owner of CFXweb and setting up the new site at SourceForge. The CFXweb site is not fully recovered yet from being hacked, so the choice to migrate to SourceForge was a good one. Unfortunately (or fortunately from another point of view) SourceForge has a more sucure support for CGIs, but their management becomes more difficult for me because a simple FTP access is not available. Finally some bugs appeared in the server-side code migrating from the old directory tree to the new one. I hope that no other bugs are hidden in the code and I hope that the next tournament will flow with only minor inconveniences as in the past four years of JROBOTS challenges.

Anyway this month brought also the greatest number of uploaded jrobots even seen for a long time. There is a total amoust of 45 jrobots in the two leagues (not counting the clones of Bohan caused by a bug). Is the new site more visible? I hope so because I feared to leave the old site, so well advertised in the past months.

The official results and more comments about the old and new jrobots in the two Leagues will appear on June 2^nd. As usual the results of the past challenge are already available on-line to the Alan Lund's "Watch" utility: Simply prepend an "old" string to the names of the default files (robots.txt and combats.txt become oldRobots.txt and oldCombats.txt, while robotsCadets.txt and combatsCadets.txt become oldRobotsCadets.txt and oldCombatsCadets.txt)

Now you can upload your jrobots to win the June 2004 JROBOTS Challenge (June 5^th-26^th 2004) aka Happy Days are Back Again!

JROBOTS is up and running again at http://jrobots.sf.net

Now it is official: CFXWeb.net, the site that hosted JROBOTS for more than four years, was hacked. Someone found a security hole in the PHP-Nuke version installed by CFXweb and create a lot of problems to the pages hosted there. In particular, I coudn't access the JROBOTS site since May 1^st. What a wonderful world!

In the meantime, I tried to set up again the old JROBOTS site at ProHosting, but now that free service includes automatically in the served pages very annoying banners. So I asked to the administrators of SourceForge (a hosting site for open source projects) to host JROBOTS. They approved the project and now JROBOTS Challenges can continue: Happy days are back again!

We'll see if the new host is good as the old one, but an advantage is already available: We have forums now. When CFXweb will restart its service, I'll point its pages to SourceForge so we'll regain all the visits of the links that point there.

I hope that finally all works fine here, but a testing phase is absolutely necessary. In particular check the version of your uploaded jrobots. Let me know any problem or bug of the new site. Thank you in advance!

JROBOTS is going to be up and running again! CFXWeb.net, the site that hosted JROBOTS for more than four years, experiences problems that I have not understand yet. I hope that the site will be restored to its original functionality, but in the meantime I set up the old site that hosted the first JROBOTS tournaments in 2000.

I hope that all is goint to work fine here, but a testing phase is absolutely necessary. ProHosting is a free hosting service and I hope that the automatic banner that is included in the served pages does not create problems to the Java applets or the Perl CGIs. The SSI pages already work, while the CGIs must be rewritten to solve a problem with the inclusion in the pages of automatic banners.

• JROBOTS

  The May 2004 JROBOTS Challenge (May 1^st-29^th 2004) starts now.

  Remember that you can send your robots even in the course of the challenge, so you're never too late. To read the results in real-time simply visit the Veterans' Battle Applet page or the Cadets' Battle Applet page. Good luck!

• GUN-TACTYX

  

  If you are interested in JROBOTS in particular, but in Programming Games in general, don't miss the Final Release of GUN-TACTYX, the CROBOTS-like game with QUAKE3-style graphics.

  The first GUN-TACTYX Championship is now announced officially and players must submit their team of warriors between May 1^st to May 22^nd 2004, then a week of matches will take place and the winner will be announced on May 30^th. Be the first winner of the GUN-TACTYX Championship: It's simpler at the beginning!

  Visit the Official Site of GUN-TACTYX for more details.
  GUN-TACTYX: Now it's your play!