README

Netrobots
---------

This was started as a group project for a C programming course at
University of Lugano (http://www.inf.unisi.ch).  This code was written
by seven 3rd semester students (with aid from the TA) in a week, working
on average 2-3 hours every day.

The game is mostly based on CROBOTS (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crobots for more info), with the following
main differences: 1) the game logic was designed from scratch based on
the CROBOTS manual; bugs and exact timings of CROBOTS are not emulated.
2) the robots run concurrently rather than in time sharing; this means
that doing math is basically free in the robots.  3) the shooting and
scanning angles are measured clockwise to allow using the C library's
sin/cos/atan functions.  4) divisions by zero will *crash* the robot
(kill it) rather than restart it.

Here is the structure:

   fight    -  Driver to start a robot fight!

   Makefile -  Makefile to build the sample robots and the server

   doc/     -  LaTeX documentation, based on CROBOTS by Tom Poindexter.

   server/  -  Source code for the server, released under the GPL (should
               work on MacOS and Linux).

   clients/ -  Source code for five sample robots (four rewrites of the
               samples provided with CROBOTS, and a rewrite of ESPOTRUN.R)
               and for the client, in the public domain.


The code is released hoping that other people can help improving it.

Usage
=====

For how to program a robot, see doc/robots.tex.

To compile the program (right now it only works on MacOS X, see below!) do

   make

To start a fight, use the enclosed fight script as follows:

   ./fight ./counter ./rook ./sniper ./spot

This will start the four enclosed "fighter" robots (the fifth, "rabbit",
does not shoot at all and can be used to start training your own robots).

Tasks
=====

Possible tasks include:

- easy: document the client/server protocol

- easy: rewrite the client library in Java/Perl/Python/Ruby (includes additional
  portability benefits!)

- easy: Windows port of the server (SDL provides a replacement for setitimer)

- easy: modify clients/robots.h to provide a compatibility layer allowing to run
  old CROBOTS code.

- easy: write a non-graphic version of the server

- medium: Windows port of the C client library

- medium: integrate the "fight" script into the server.


Known bugs
==========

None. :-)


Credits
=======

The authors of the initial release are:

    game logic     Davide Arrigo
                   Masiar Babazadeh
                   Roberto Minelli

    graphics       Sascha Dominguez
                   Matthias Eberli

    networking     Remo Lemma
                   Patrick Zulian

    coordination   Paolo Bonzini <bonzini@gnu.org>