Battleships never generates Replays directory

Entelect Challenge 2017 Technical Support
1

Hi guys

Literally found out about this fantastic series of events this week. Better late than never.

I’ve started work on a bot and things are going relatively smoothly, but I don’t ever seem to get it right that the program generates a Replays directory in the Game Engine folder.

I am expecting something like this:

…Replays/
…{Match Time Stamp}/
…{Phase and Round Number}/
… engine.log
… A - map.txt
… B - map.txt
… state.json
… roundinfo.json
… {Player Key}/
… log.txt
… map.txt
… state.json
… place.txt
… command.txt

Any help would be appreciated. Feels like I’m missing something obvious.

2

Hi Paulds,

Try running the engine in administrator mode?

Kind regards

3

Hi Foamy

I’m definitely running the command prompt as an admin.

I forced an error and can see in debug mode that it seems to be executing from the game directory (see below line), however if I go to that path there is no directory called Replays in the Game Engine folder. Makes troubleshooting a bit of a challenge.

Executing bot with following commands C:\...\python.exe "bot.py" B "C:\Entelec Challenge\Game Engine\Replays\2017-07-14 13-16-38-363\Phase 2 - Round 75\B"
4

Mystery solved! It seems my anti-virus was running the engine in a sandbox as an automatic default. Added an exception and all is right in the world again.

5

Spoke way too soon. It only generated one replay… can’t create another now. Anti-virus is completely switched off. Running the EXE as admin. Can’t seem to get to the bottom of it.

6

Hi Paulds,

Can you post the commands used to start the game engine?

7 
.\Battleships --pretty -b "C:\Entelec Challenge\Python3" "C:\Entelec Challenge\My Bot 2.0" --debug --clog

I’ve also tried explicitly setting a path to write out to which doesn’t seem to work either.

8

Hi Paulds,

That is rather strange. It has to be something related to your system specifically. Can you try running it from a different location such as the desktop? Also try switching of the anti-virus to see if that makes a difference.

As a last resort try setting the folder permissions to only allow your user to have access, the game and bots will run under your user account, that way any other programs that might be deleting the files shouldn’t be able to anymore.