niknetniko/planetwars-starterpack

Planetwars starterpack

The entrypoint to create your own bot for our AI planetwars game.

Get immediatly started with just a few steps.

Prebuilt client (easiest)

A prebuilt binary for linux is available on the github releases page for this repository. If this doesn't work for you, follow the instructions in Building the client below to build it yourself.

You will need to download 3 files which are all provided in the repository

1. the binary
2. the example config
3. the example bot

Put all these files in the same folder and start the client:

./planetwars-client run config.toml

Now continue to Joining a lobby to play your first game.

Building the client

Required tools

• curl
• git
• gcc (or any other C compiler of your choice)
• rust

Installing rust

If you don't have rust installed already, run this command to install it:

curl --proto '=https' --tlmsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

It should ask what version to install. The default is fine, so just press enter.

Now, activate rust in your current shell:

source $HOME/.cargo/env

Building the client

Next, build the client

cd planetwars-starterpack/client
cargo build

Now you can run

cargo run client ../config.toml

(sidenote: for the prebuilt client we used the run subcommand, but here we use the client subcommand. These are aliasses, the author got upset typing cargo run run in their terminal.)

Joining a lobby

Using the method of your chosing described above, you should now have your client running.

You should see some output stating a bot token was generated for you. We will use this token in the next step to identify your user. You probably want to add this token to your configuration file to make it permanent, as per the instructions in your terminal. If you don't do this, a new token will be generated the next time you run the client, so you'll have to authenticate again.

If you already have a lobby URL you wish to join, simply navigate there. If not, you can create a new lobby at games.zeus.gent.

1. Click the big blue 'join lobby' button
2. Enter your desired username, and the token you got in the last step.

Playing matches

You can now challenge other players in the lobby by using the 'new game' button. Once all players have accepted your proposed match, you can start it, and the match should appear in the match list shortly. Note that one player can be in a match multiple times, so you can play against your own bot if you like.

How does this work?

The client you are running on your system connects to the game server. When a match starts, the game server will simply request your client to start a bot for the given player slot. Your client will then execute the bot command specified in your configuration file to play the match. Messages from the game server will be relayed to stdin of that bot process, and lines written to stdout will be sent back to the gameserver.

Writing your own bot

We provided the simple.py script as a very simple bot to show you how it works. Feel free to use this file as a starting point, as inspiration, or disregard it altogether and come up with your own bot. Anything you can run on your own system will work as a bot, it just has to read from stdin and write to stdout. You can edit the config.toml file to set the command that will be used to start your bot.

Be aware that it is possible that your bot will be running multiple times simultaneously, keep this in mind when e.g. logging output to a file.

You can find a good overview of the game rules on the old PlanetWars website.

Good luck and have fun!

FAQ

How do I play against other people?

Simply send them the url of your lobby. They will then have to enter their own username en token to enter.

How do I run my own bot and not simple.py?

Just edit the config.toml file and change the command after bot-command = ... into your own command.

I want to join different lobbies with my bot.

You can use the same token used in the first lobby for other lobbies.