Independent of what language you want to work in, you will need the ClientRunner found in this repository.
The ClientRunner connects to the match server and communicates in- and output with your bot.
So to get started, you:
- Fork, Clone or Download this repo
- Choose the language you want to work in. There are starter bots for Python and Java. You can find these in the
PythonBotandJavabotdirectory respectively. If you want to use your a different language: you can, but we discourage this. See below for more info.
You can run your bot by running the ClientRunner.py script in the framework directory.
This script has an optional argument to use another config file.
In the framework directory you will also find a config file. By changing it you can configure:
- The name of your team
- Whether to enable the clientside visualiser
- Whether to print the StdErr output of your bot (which you can use to debug your bot)
- What command to run to run your bot
- Where to connect to the server (you probably won't need to change this)
When you connect to the server, you specify a lobby to join. This can be any string.
If you join the same lobby as someone else you will be in the same game. A lobby can hold 2-4 people in it, depending on the current server configuration.
When a lobby is full the game starts.
The easiest way to debug your bot is to have it play matches so you can observe its behaviour and use its debugging output.
In order to do this you can run the ClientRunnner twice and connect to the same room in both.
In order to know which terminal window corresponds to what character in the game, we recommend you copy your config file.
In this copy you can use a dummy team name and disable the visualiser (and debug output, if you are so inclined).
It may also be useful to have this dummy player run a bot that only idles, by specifying a run command to a bot which only idles.
You can then run this dummy player using ClientRunner.py [otherconfig].
- The map consists of 15 x 15 tiles.
- A tile is one of the following:
| Empty |  |
Walkable, unless occupied by a bomb or player. |
| Tree |  |
Non-walkable. Blocks explosions, but is destroyed in the process. |
| Mountain |  |
Non-walkable. Blocks explosions. |
| Water |  |
Non-walkable. Blocks explosions. |
- The game consists of rounds till one or zero players are left
- Each round you can either walk or stand still and either place a bomb or not
- You can not walk through people or stand on the same tile, you also can't stand on the tile a different player stood in the round that you made the move
- You can not walk through bombs, but you can stand on your own if you haven't moved yet
- After a bomb is placed 7 turn go past and it explodes
- A bomb explodes in the shape of an infinite +
- When an explosion hits a tree, it does not go further and the bomb disappears
- When an explosion touches an other bomb it also instantly explodes
- If there are multiple bombs on a line still only one tree dies
- Getting hit by a bomb loses one life
- If you don't have any lives left you lose and die
- Bomberman is the first battle royale and thus after the specified rounds, water comes in 1 tile and everything on those tiles disappears and/or dies
- The time limit per round is 0.5 seconds
- It is better to build a dumb functional bot which you improve iteratively, then to build a smart bot which you don't complete in time.
- Implementing Minimax will take significant time and probably won't be worth it.
- The water is very dangerous so really watch out for that.
You can find a copy of the protocol in the repo. And you can use the example bots as reference. But keep in mind that this will take a significant amount of time and you will not have much left to develop the actual bot.