RBC: Programs and Utilities

News:
Oct. 1, 2008

Hobbies - Update!
Part2: Have made some progress on this crazy model, check it out!

Part1: Firefly rocks, and this paper Firefly model is wicked! It's amazingly detailed, so you really need patience putting it together. I'll update on my progress as I build it, but I suspect it'll take quite some time!!

Programming
I just found this tutorial, "Animating Sprites with SDL", which works great. Looks like a great starting place for some game graphics programing!

Hackings
Setting up GBDE always takes a long time... Currently it is doing a random flush on my 232GB disk, which will take about 4.5hours on this reasonably fast machine (a dell precision 390). If you are using FreeBSD there is this excellent step-by-step guide in the handbook. Only a few more hours left until the next step...which has now come and gone! The rest of the steps went flawlessly. A quick test (dd if=/dev/zero of=junk bs=1M count=100) shows about 9MB/s (iostat -w 1), quite a performance hit from the 49MB/s I get on the non-encrypted disk. However, 9MB/s is enough for my needs.

I can't wait to try out the ThinkPad X61s with hardware level disk encryption!

Robot Battle
Current year-long competition: RALLY CUP 2008 (Rules)

Robot Battle Port!
David Finch ported most of RB to compile with gcc. I've succesffully compiled it in FreeBSD. I hope to do more with it, perhaps automated tournaments!

Programs:

Unofficial Robot Distribution Program
Contest Runner version 0.02b
Robot Battle Controller for RB v1.33
Ardus - Robot Battle Editor V1.1
Non-RB related programs/games

Post-Nuke Comic Update!
The Post-Nuke comic is now on sale! Check it out here!

Programming
Currently programming a simple orbital simulation program, which has finally come to a useable stage. What I've found is that changing orbits is relatively easy (ie: using Hohmann transfer orbit), but changing the object's possition in orbit is not (for example, trying to dock to another object!) I have unfortunately lost the link explaining it...but remember it require 3 engine impulses. Here's a screenshot of the program:

OpenBSD!

Robot Battle Programs

Unofficial Robot Distribution Program (v1.22) - [11,084 bytes]

This is Brad's original distribution program with a few extra features added to it. Version 1.21 has no code changes except what was necessary to converted it to work in MS Visual C++ 6.0. In version 1.22, I added prompting so that it asks before overwriting existing *.dst files, an option not to remove comments before scrambling, and an option that allows you to add a text message to the scrambled file. Most importantly, you can now select robots with long filenames by using file open/save dialogs common to Win9x.

Back to top

Contest Runner version 0.02b:

I've added a 'Remove' button so that you can remove any matches that you don't want, and also made some fixes to how each match data is saved. As I mentioned before, you can't run a contest with it yet, but you can run several matches automatically (and if you have 2 robots per match, the results file will display their scores nicely). Click the title above or here to download it. It's approximately 18KB in size. I've also updated the readme.txt somewhat. (Nov. 22/02)

Back to top

Robot Battle Controller V1.9 (BETA) - [67,916 bytes]

This program was created to be used with Robot Battle v1.33. It automatically runs up to 16 matches for you. All you must do is enter the robots filenames and click start. You can also save and reload your matches. And now RBC uses the RESULTS.TXT instead of making BMP files. This version has some fixes and improvements (eg: it'll now run robots with long filenames).

(Note - You'll need VBRUN300.DLL to run the above program (it should be in your Windows\System directory if you have it). If you need it you can download it from the Robot Battle ftp site by clicking here - [229,745 bytes] Then just unzip it to your Windows\System folder, or to the same folder where you unzipped the 3D X's and O's game.)

You can also download the previous version if the above beta version gives you trouble (this one uses BMP files for its results):

Robot Battle Controller V1.2b - [297,618 bytes]
(vbrun300.dll is included in this zip file)

Back to top

Ardus - Robot Battle Editor V1.1

In the old days, to program robots for Robot Battle people just used Notepad. But with todays advanced robots, creating a robot with Notepad just isn't practical. Instead, I've created an editor specifically designed to help you build your robots. Click the above link to go to the Ardus web page, where you can get more information about this editor and also download the program.

Back to top