Third programming contest

Deutsche Version ebenfalls verfügbar!

Same procedure as every day: It is late in the evening and you're still sitting at your office desk and listening to some music. Suddenly a siren sounds through all rooms, the doors are closing automatically and you cannot open them anymore. A light green mist appears and some creepy shapes wander around the hall. Sometimes you really hate Mondays …

This brings us to the main topic: For the third time in its history freiesMagazin organizes a programming contest. In the first one (German text) you needed to switch gems, the second was a little bit more challenging in steering a robot through a factory (German text). This time the task is easier: Run for your life because zombies are attacking. (If you do not like zombies, imagine some freaky aliens, poisonous giant spiders or something else.)

Here is a last overview of the requirements for participating in the contest (for more details see the links in the table of contents at the left side):

  • Create an AI that moves over the map
  • Hide in the blue team and seek in the red team
  • Communicate with the server and interpret its commands
  • Programming language of your choice
  • Open Source license
  • Deadline: 19th of December 2010, 11:59 pm
  • Win a gift coupon amounting to 50, 30 or 20 Euro

Download the engine including example AI and GUI: via FTP or via HTTP

If you have questions, suggestions or any contribution to the contest, please send an e-mail to redaktion ETT freiesmagazin PUNKT de.

If you want to be informed about changes in the contest, you should subscribe to the comments of this page via RSS. But only the freiesMagazin team are allowed to write new comments.

We wish all participants good luck and are looking forward to an interesting contest.

Note: The manual is available for German speakers, too.

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Update 19.10.2010 – Bugfix

Verfasst von dominik am 19. Oktober 2010 - 19:42.

I've changed the script start.sh so that you can now use the relative paths to the map files.

Update 23.10.2010 – Bugfix

Verfasst von dominik am 23. Oktober 2010 - 19:14.

Fixed a little bug in board1.map with missing keys for doors E, F and H. Thanks to Marco for the hint.

Update 25.10.2010 – Manual

Verfasst von dominik am 25. Oktober 2010 - 20:38.

Some minor updates in the manual:

  • You cannot/must not use the .toxic-file.
  • You should not store toxic values and the keys positions for a later game.
  • You can work in a team and share the price afterwards.
  • The contest will be running on a Intel Core2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00GHz and 4 GB memory with a 64-Bit-Xubuntu 10.04.

Update 26.10.2010 – Bugfix

Verfasst von dominik am 26. Oktober 2010 - 5:45.

Fixed major bug with invisible key if field is surrounded by seven blocks and is only open on one side.

Update 26.10.2010 – Bugfix 2

Verfasst von dominik am 26. Oktober 2010 - 16:25.

Fixed one bug in the morning and created a new one. Fixed this again!

Update 29.10.2010 – Manual

Verfasst von dominik am 29. Oktober 2010 - 6:40.

There won't be any doors or keys anymore because they made the game too complex.

Update 04.11.2010 – Bugfix

Verfasst von dominik am 4. November 2010 - 22:34.

I fixed major bug with movement in the player class, if the movement is NONE. In this case the return value always was (0,0) and not the current position.

I fixed a minor bug with debugging output in game map if the access was out of boundary in []-operator.

And finally I added field numbers to the gui so that you need not count the fields every time from the top left corner.

Update 16.12.2010 – Changes in AiEngine

Verfasst von dominik am 16. Dezember 2010 - 6:57.
  • made AiEngine::calcNextMove non const
  • added empty methods processCommandStoreToxicValue and processCommandStoreLife to AiEngine for overloading
  • made AiEngine methods virtual for overloading
  • added copyright to all files

Update 17.12.2010 – Bugfix

Verfasst von dominik am 17. Dezember 2010 - 21:18.

Fixed major bug with acception of IDs if clients answer too fast.