Feature: Independent Bots and Communication

[ikefruusto]

[jcothran]

What you're mentioning is part of what I'm currently doing with a simple game prototype - its not as simple as asteroids, its more of a top-down 2D shooter, so using some astar pathing routine is involved for the client to be smart when moving around.

But the game does support solo and/or team play with each client running a socket connection against a central game server. So messages can be broadcast between teammates(I've spotted a target at x/y, etc) and clients can further coordinate macro-level strategy on their end.

Still working out some kinks with the game server and sample client, but its available to test out to anyone interested and will develop for others as interested.

http://code.google.com/p/sqlitebot/wiki/phibian

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2248

Thanks
Jeremy

[antimatroid]

We had originally looked at doing something like this with ants, where each ant would be its own independent process, however we decided the overhead for this was too large, especially when it came to playing games over tcp.

It may be more feasible if the game has a fairly small maximum number of agents for each player.

[agent_smith]

That's one of the key ideas in Battlecode - each robot can communicate with others only by sending and receiving messages.

http://www.battlecode.org/

[Stocha]

[delt0r]

We tried it. It is *really* slow to run many independent things at once. Since each "thing" is like a player. We have very limited server resources. Look at all the complaints about how slow ants was.

Nice idea, but impractical in practice.

Unless you are prepared to wait 2 weeks between games anyway.

[Stocha]

[delt0r]

Unless you limit CPU usage it cannot be faster.

[jcothran]

How about if all the central server does is validate that submitted client moves are legal(and within a certain time frame) by the game? Seems like from a centralized perspective that would give more gameplay options and be less resource intensive than the current setup of uploading and running all the submitted clients in-house.

[delt0r]

All the "clients" or threads or whatever run on the same machine. If you say do the TCP thing, then people who have faster computers will have an advantage. Believe me this is has all been trashed to death a few times over and then some.