Seekers Server

In seekers, AIs compete against each other with the aim of scoring as many points as possible. This project is competition-oriented for students.

Getting started

Please note that at least java 11 is required.

Installation

Get a jar file from the release or build it on your own.

From release

There is currently no official release available, however you can check out Jitpack for snapshot builds.

Build it on your own

First get this repo locally. You can download the zip file or fork and clone it. You can build the jar with the following command:

bash mvnw install

That's it! You can find the jar file in the target folder. Please note that for execution you will need the file with the uber classifier.

Run it

You can run the jar file with the following command:

java -jar seekers-server-*.*.*.jar

If you start the server for the first time, the following file and folders will be created:

Folder	Purpose
config.ini	Config file for changing the settings
players	Bot files from the players
plugins	Loading plugin jar files
results	Save tournament results

Before the server starts, the app checks first if all listed paths exist. If a path does not exist, it will be created. Then it will launch all plugins. It will create a tournament with a list of matches. In the tournament will every player play a match against every other opponent. If the

Config

In the config.ini, you can set properties for the game and your plugins. Note that all plugins have their own section. For example, the section of the python plugin is [python-plugin]. The name of the section is equivalent to the id of the plugin. Please note that the config file of the seekers-py repo and this config file are interchangeable. If you have already altered your config file for python, you can simply reuse it for the server.

Please note that the playtime is measured in game ticks. For a conversion between ticks and time, you can look at the table below:

Ticks	Time
1	10ms
100	1s
6000	1min
30000	5min
90000	15min
360000	1h
8640000	1d
3155760000	1a

Players

The server will create a tournament with all AIs that are in the players folder. A file is marked as a valid player if it starts with ai. Drop all files you want to run into this folder and start the server. Please note that an empty folder will result into an empty tournament. If the tournament is empty, the server will be closed automatically.

Plugins

The server will not host any clients on its own. If you want to do it automatically instead manually, you can add plugins. Simply download the plugin jar from the release page of the publisher, move it to the plugins folder and add the settings if required to the config.

Results

All results will be saved in the results folder. This file contains a list of all matches that are still running and a map of all results for the players. Every player has a list of all the points that it received in the respective match.

{
  "matches": [
    ["players/ai-x\u003dx+1.py", "players/ai-triumvirat.py"],
    ["players/ai-undefined.py", "players/ai-triumvirat.py"]
  ],
  "results": {
    "players/ai-x\u003dx+1": [0], 
    "players/ai-undefined":[0]
  }
}

Structure

This is the class diagram of important types in this program:

classDiagram
    Entity: update()
    Entity <|-- Animation
    Entity <|-- Physical
    
    Animation: destroy()
    Animation <|-- GoalAnimation
    Animation <|-- SeekerAnimation
    
    Physical: collision(...)
    Physical <|-- Goal
    Physical <|-- Seeker

    Corresponding: associated()
    Corresponding <|-- Physical
    Corresponding <|-- Player
    Corresponding <|-- Camp
    
    GameMap: getDistance(...)
    GameMap: getDifference(...)
    GameMap: getDirection(...)
    GameMap <|-- TorusMap