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Proposed Learning Goals

  1. Understand NetBots demo robots:

    • Download and run the demo and examine the code for the demo robots.
    • What is the strengths and weaknesses of each demo robot?
    • Understand how robots communicate with the server.
    • Run the server with the '-h' option to learn how the server behavior can be changed.
    • What useful information is in the server conf?
    • Understand netbots_log module's use of logging level. Try -debug and -verbose.
    • Run netbots on over several computers.
    • Read the entire NetBots README to learn more.

  2. Learn to program for a real-time environment with limited information.

    • Make a robot that can beat all the demo robots.
    • How can each demo robot's basic strategy be be improved? e.g. faster locating of enemies, avoiding hit damage.
    • Can the strategies of multiple demo robots be combined into a single robot? Does this result is a better outcome?
    • What information is available that none of the demo robots use? How an that information be used effectively?
    • Look for other strategies that win faster with less health lost.

  3. Understand how computer and network resources affect the game.

    • Run a tournament with all processes on one computer and then run the same tournament with all processes on different computers. Watch the network and CPU use.
    • What's the difference in resource use and game outcome?
    • How do the server and robot stat differ? Why do they differ?
    • What if you speed up the server by using the -stepsec server option or change the -droprate server option?
    • Understand IP and port number: Why can only one program use a port number at a time? Why can a different computer use the same port number?
    • Remove the need to specify robot port (-p) by having the robot find an available port. Can you remove the need to specify IP?

  4. Learn how having access to more or less information can improve program logic.

    • Do some robots perform better if message drop rate is turned off (dropRate = 0). Do some perform worse? Why?
    • Make one program that acts as two robots and have them share information. Can this combined robot perform better?

  5. Learn to work with multiple sockets and custom message formats.

    • Make two programs, each acting as one robot, that work together by sending messages to each other.
    • Use of the netbots_ipc asynchronous methods for communication between robots.
    • Add message types to netbots_ipc for your own use.

  6. Learn to communicate asynchronously with server.

    • Inspect and understand how BotSocket.sendrecvMessage() works.
    • Stop using synchronous BotSocket.sendrecvMessage() in your robot. Use asynchronous BotSocket.sendMessage() and BotSocket.recvMessage() instead.
    • Send more than 1 message to the server per step. The server processes up to 4 messages from each robot per step (discards more than 4). This offers 4 times the information per step than sendrecvMessage() can provide.

  7. Miscellaneous:

    • Learn GIT and how to contribute to an open source project on GitHub. Add some functionality to NetBots or fix a bug.
    • Learn TK GUI. Make improvements to the NetBots viewer.