The game for the Entelect Challenge 2021, is Galaxio. For the first time since Bomberman, we will be introducing a multiplayer game. But unlike Bomberman, Galaxio will see more than 4 contestants playing in a Battle Royale style game.
Every year, the Entelect Challenge is based on a theme from popular games. This year’s game being Agar.io, which lends itself to a vast multiplayer universe – a perfect fit for the 10th anniversary of the Entelect challenge.
You will be coding an artificial intelligence (AI) player, or bot, to challenge other AI players. In a match your player is a ship which will compete against a variable number of other ships in an ever-decreasing circular map, representing the universe. The goal is to be the last ship alive. Your ship will need to consume food, collide with other players, avoid obstacles such as asteroid fields or gas clouds and use other elements such as wormholes to your advantage.
Code an intelligent bot and stand a chance to win a share of R200K in prizes.
Get started by heading to https://challenge.entelect.co.za/
Thanks for making the new release happen! I’m really looking forward to using the new submission system. For the Python bot, what is the difference between the source-code.zip and the built-code.zip that we upload (since both are the same)? Are both needed? I see the C++ bot only has the source-code.zip
Hi there, I’m glad you’ve already had a chance to check it out!
In terms of the source-code.zip and built-code.zip , I’m assuming you are referring to their presence in the build file for GitHub?
Thanks for bringing that one to our attention. That is a bug, and both don’t need to be there. We will update and let you know once the updated GitHub actions file is available for download from your player portal!
In the meantime, you can go ahead and use the file as is - it shouldn’t fail in the interim.
You’re absolute right about the process - simply commit to your master or main branch and that commit will be processed as a submission!
In terms of your concerns around a community member pushing to a public repo - could you explain a bit what has you worried?
Regarding your commit history: No, we have no access to your commit history or your repository at all. The GitHub action processes everything inside your repository and simply sends the artifacts to us - that is, the zipped source-code, zipped built-code (if relevant to your language), and the built docker image. Everything else stays inside your repository, safe!
If you would like to make changes that do not kick off a submission, you can simply create a new branch and work on that. When you are complete, just merge this branch into your master or main branch to kick off a submission for it.
As we have now launched, as always, we are now into Phase 1.
If you have any feedback about the game that you’d like to raise to the team, please use one of the below topics:
Phase 1 Balancing for talks related to the balance of the game, whether it be something is too easy, too hard, or just not sitting right.
and
Phase 1 Issues for when you come across something you suspect might be a bug, problem with the game or mechanics, or something we could improve in the code base.
If neither of these are working for you, feel free to open discussions on in the general topic and chat with your fellow challengers, and us, the dev team!
Thanks for the fix - as for the source-code zip, is this just to keep a record of our source or is it used to build anything (I’m assuming not since that is the job of the docker image if I’m understanding correctly?). I’d like to modify it so that the entire repo doesn’t get zipped (or actually tar’red ) and just my bot’s source, is that acceptable?
This looks great - love the game and the battle royale/non-1v1 style. The async type of move making should be interesting too - different from any previous challenge, I think.
Is there any documentation on how bots should communicate with the game engine? Or do we need to reverse engineer this from looking at the sample bots?
Just thinking if a top contender accidentally builds a public repo it could be bad in general,
Especially from an accidental point of view,
Thank you for the info then. Im pretty new at Github but always try and learn some new things for Entelect,
Also look forward to potentially having some more math than other years.
But have not even looked at the harness. Holding off cause when I do Im probably losing some hours.
We need your primary source code to verify that code has not been stolen / lifted from another player. This is also to verify that your submission is legitimately your submission.
In terms of what else your code is used for: Nothing. It is simply for this verification step.
In terms of modifying the actions file, we do not recommend it. However, I can understand the inclusion of additional files that might not be relevant to your submission, in your repository.
Just be aware that if the file is no longer valid, does not work, or does not upload the required contents to our cloud infrastructure, this might cause us to be not able to verify the submission.
In support scenarios, we will simply ask you to redownload and push the file provided to you by the player portal.
So TL;DR, we don’t recommend it, but feel free to. Just ensure the artifacts provided back to our infrastructure are maintained, and your entire source code is present. By entire, I mean all the code that is included in the running bot.
very cool competition guys! i’m really excited that the game board is a continuous Cartesian plane (not a grid) and that the game runs at a fixed tick rate instead of turn based. the game itself seems like it’ll be incredibly fun to develop bots for.
and the approach of using SignalR to communicate between bots & the engine, and using Docker compose to orchestrate everything is also very handy for testing. I’m hoping it won’t be too complex for people without docker experience
keen to see what everyone comes up with!
) and just my bot’s source, is that acceptable?