robotour - control mobile robots in this programmer's game

robotour [OPTION]... ROBOT...

Simulate the specified ROBOTs (.rob files).

RoboCom is a programming game. Before the game starts, each player writes an assembler-like program which has to decide for itself later on, in order to win the game. The pieces on the chess-like field are robots, which have the abilities to move, multiply, exchange program code etc. The goal is to put the other players' robots out of action while staying functional yourself.

RoboCom is not a military game! There is nothing like weapons: the only way to influence another robot is to transfer program code. And that makes it particularly interesting. The programming language is easy to learn, however it provides an amazingly wide spectrum of different strategies, which are all successful in another way.

RoboTour is a fast, portable, fully compatible and free RoboCom interpreter and tournament engine. It can be used to run simple simulations, big tournaments and even create competitions to which robots can be added later on. (Check out RoboTop by the same author, which makes this process much easier.) Graphical display of tournaments (even in 3D), robot debugging and simulation history are all available.

-vis

Open the graphical visualization window (if available). You need not specify any other options or robots, as these can also be set using the mouse. The simulation will be displayed while running.

-h, -help, --help

display command line help and exit

--version

output version information and exit

-n N

Repeat simulations N times. This will reduce the influence of random effects (such as starting positions) on the result. Default is 10, like the Internet competitions.

-o FILE

Specify location or file name of the option set (default: robocom.rco, these are the RC3 rules)

-s

Switch to "single" mode: Simulate the first specified robot against all others.

-c

Switch to "charts" mode: Simulate everyone against everyone. (default)

-i

Switch to "all in one" mode: Simulate all of the specified bots in one field, at the same time.

-t N

Switch to "top N" mode: Create a competition to which, later on, more robots can be added. If there are more than N robots in the competition, the worst will be dropped.

-T N

Same as -t, but results of partially simulated robots are recognized. (This will only make a difference from -t if the last run of RoboTour was aborted.)

-cf F

For top mode: Specify the competition folder for robots and result files. (default: current)

-p X

print the field every X cycles (default: 0 = function inactive)

-debug P X

Debug every X cycles (default: 0 = function inactive) the bots on field range P (coords start at 0; example for p: 0,0:1,1)

-r

No randomization => always the same result

-v N

Set verbose level (0-5) (default = 5; no output = 0)

-sound

Enable sound output using sox.

-rate N

Produce a rating for the first bot on cycle N and end the game. If N < 0, wait for timeout.

-prof T

Create a profile of type T for all robots. Possible types are count (number of executions of each instruction in the program), time (spent during all of the executions) and fail, which calculates the failure ratio for some instructions (such as CREATE and TRANS).

Robots are plain text files. Every robot consists of a header, which gives general information about it (such as the robot's and the author's name), followed by one or more code banks which contain the actual program. A very simple example robot follows:

Example robot

Published Name Turnaround Bot Published Author Robert Robot Published Country Nomansland

Bank Main Turn 0 ; Turn left forever!n

More example robots are installed in /usr/share/doc/robotour/examples/. Detailed information on how to create your own robots is available online at http://www.cyty.com/robocom/?area=help .

An option set includes all the options and rules for a certain simulation. This includes the size of the board, the timeout, availability of the new RC3 instructions or multitasking, how many cycles each instruction takes to execute, and much more. Several option sets are installed along with RoboTour (normally, in /usr/share/robotour/optsets/):

robocom.rco

The default option set. These are the options that are used in the World Cup at http://www.cyty.com/robocom/ , so it is recommended to stick to this one when developing robots for that competition.

RC3S.rco

RoboCom 3 Standard Rules, a copy of the file above.

classic.rco

Classic rules from RoboCom 2. These are used for the classic competition. Many of the instructions are not allowed in this option set.

Written by Florian Fischer <florianfischer@gmx.de> and Martin Trautmann <martintrautmann@gmx.de>.

This manual page was written by Shaun Jackman <sjackman@debian.org> for the Debian system and extended by Florian Fischer.

Please report bugs to the authors.

Copyright 2000-2004 Florian Fischer and Martin Trautmann.

http://www.cyty.com/robocom/