Quickies: CDRDAO found to be safe, robots games

I was checking out the paranoia option for CDRDAO earlier today and I found that it actually uses cdparanoia-lib or some such. In other words, CDRDAO uses some, if not all, of the same code for ripping audio as cdparanoia. Just an interesting note. I’m still not ripping my audio CDs to one big assed FLAC file.

I was kind of tired tonight after seeing Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines but I had eaten too recently so I didn’t want to go to bed. I played a bit of UQM but that got kind of boring — especially since I can’t play my saved games on PPC. Then I remembered all the fun I used to have with an old game I played on my PC. You were given a graphical arena, and you had to program a bot using a Pascal-like language. (I’m not sure if this was PRobots or not.) I went looking for something similar that would run in Linux/PPC, was graphical, and preferably gave me my choice of language.

My first choice of language was Python, and I found pRobots. P.S.: this name is already taken by Pascal Robots, I think. There’s also war, another Python robots game; I’m just not sure how complete/working it is. Both of these projects don’t look like they’re still being developed to me, but who knows? Maybe they don’t need to have continuous attention.

Next I did a bunch of searching. I found the Programming Games category on Google. Lots of dead programs, lots of programs for Windows only, or Linux/x86 (implicitly) at best. Even a few commercial programs, which kind of surprised me: I didn’t think there was enough of a market for this kind of game, really. In the end, I came down to about three more candidates.

The first is GNU Robots. GNU robots uses Guile for programming the robots, I think, so not exactly your choice of programming language. Still, I’m OK with Scheme – even interested in it, really. I think it has a graphical interfaces, xrobots, but I didn’t look too hard — and I especially didn’t try to build it. Hasn’t been touched in a while, I think.

Next up is RealTimeBattle. This game lets you use any programming language you want, I believe; robots communicate with the server via stdin/stdout. Hasn’t been touched in a while I think. Looks promising, though.

Last is Cadaver. I’m not entirely certain, but I think the idea is that you’re a Cyborg race and you have to procreate. This one sounds interesting because it’s not the usual blowing-shit-up kind of thing. Communication is done with the server via TCP/IP, so any programming language. Graphical interface indeed, if perhaps a bit ugly. No turns: your commands are issued as soon as they’re received, supposedly. Makes me wonder if one bot could monopolize the entire server.

There were a few other candidates. There was RoboCom which might work on Linux/PPC, if I can get all the Java stuff pulled together. It’s got its own language, though, kind of assembly-like. C++Robots might be neat… if it had a graphical environment. XPilot++ mentioned something about robots, but I’m really not sure if this is related or not; I just put this here because I seem to recall XPilot being cool.

I think my first try will be with RealTimeBattle. If I ever get around to giving this a whirl I’ll post.