Hi troutwine. The sources are all open-sourced. You can get it at code.google.com/p/ai-contest. You can even check out the code yourself and work on it. The visualizer is in the repo under trunk/planet_wars/viz/. There is a Makefile in there that builds it too. Take a look at this issue and let us know what you find?
In general, there are a lot of things wrong with the visualizer. Perhaps you could become the visualizer guru, and help us improve it!