A programmatic robot-fighting game, heavily inspired by Robot Game. It is online at GobotGame.com.

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Instructions for installing Go can be found here. Once Go is installed on your system and your GOPATH is set properly, run go get -u github.com/bcspragu/Gobots/... to install the relevant packages for Gobots.

1. Go to Gobot Game and enter a user name. It'll return a unique token that you'll input into game.StartServerForFactory which authenticates you and identifies you to the server.
2. Your bot will show up in the list of Online Bots, you can start a match with another online bot (or yourself), by selecting "Fight Bots".
3. Watch the match play out, tweak bot, repeat!

First, build the JS necessary for running the frontend:

gopherjs build github.com/bcspragu/Gobots/gopherjs --output=js/gopher.js

After pulling the repository, the server can be run with:

go run github.com/bcspragu/Gobots

Connect to the site at localhost:8000 and create an account and get a token.

To connect an example bot to the running server, run:

go run github.com/bcspragu/Gobots/simplebots --addr=localhost:8001 --token=<insert token> --bot_name=random

Several example robots are provided in the simplebots subdirectory, though none of them are even remotely good. Building a bot and connecting it to the server can be done with the following snippet.

package main

import "github.com/bcspragu/Gobots/game"

// Bot moves to the center and does nothing else
type bot struct{}

func (bot) Act(b *game.Board, r *game.Robot) game.Action {
  return game.Action{
    Kind:      game.Move,
    Direction: game.Towards(r.Loc, b.Center()),
  }
}

func main() {
	game.StartServerForFactory("MyBot", "MyAccessToken", game.ToFactory(bot{}))
}

The game.StartServerForFactory call will take in an instance of your bot, connect to the GobotGame server, authenticate your bot, and play matches as they're requested through the website. It'll automatically attempt to reconnect to the server if the connection is lost, and will return error messages if the AccessToken is invalid or there's something wrong with the bot. To disconnect your bot from the server, type Ctrl-C from the terminal.

A bot is anything that implements the game.AI interface. If you make a fancy bot that can keep memory about the history about the current match, you might want to implement the Factory function on your own, which will be called every time a new game is created, and passed the game ID.

All of the connecting to the server is handled by game.StartServerForFactory, which takes three parameters.

"MyBot" is the name of your robot. Pick something unique and intimidating.

"MyAccessToken" can be gotten from GobotGame.com once it's online. The rules are nearly identical to the rules for RobotGame.

The final field is a Factory wrapping your bot. If you haven't implemented the factory on your own, you can use the game.ToFactory utility method.

The game package contains a function FightBots for fighting two bots against each other and observing the outcome. To actually view the contents of a match, connect both of the bots to the server and fight them on there.

I have a bunch of Google Cloud credits for anyone who wants to serve there bot on Compute Engine. There's a guide for getting started with Go on Compute Engine here, and there's also the cloudlaunch package for easily deploying binaries to Cloud Engine, if you're on a 64-bit Linux distro.

[ ] Fix all the TODOs/error handling/good coding practice issues [ ] Add a comprehensive test suite, aiming for >95% test coverage [ ] Set bot timeouts to a lower, more reasonable value, and use WebSockets to live update the user on which round is currently being played [ ] Add machinery/pipelining so that matches between online bots can happen without user intervention [ ] Add a script/tool that uses cloudlaunch or a similar idea to upload bots to the cloud [ ] Finalize the bot API, stop exposing raw board fields, which complicates local FightBot testing [ ] Add a local GUI or web-mode so players can test their bots more easily [ ] Convert a few simple bots from Robot Game so people have something to test against (also finish converting Sunguard) [ ] Add methods for even easier usage of AI package [In Progress] [ ] Handle disconnect error cases better [Next on the hit list] [ ] Move 3rd party things to third_party [ ] Only send down the list of cells on the first RPC call