Game Engine Updates

[linjoehan]

I’ve made adjustments to align with the player on the portal, if it changes back can I please use my previous upload?

[Edwin]

Operation Firestorm Incoming

Hi everyone, We ran into some small issues regarding Operation Firestorm. The tournament matches will be scheduled tonight and then the leaderboard will update as expected. Some of you might have noticed that the reference matches ran with missile speed of 1 instead of 2 before the deadline for the tournament. This was wrong and has now been corrected so that the tournament runs with a missile speed of 2. If you uploaded a bot to cater for the missile speed being 1 instead of 2 and you want us…

[Andre]

Hi @pierre.roux,
I’m a little worried about inconsistencies I get sometimes when I run the engine… sometimes turns are being skipped by one of my bots due to no fault of their own (that I can find)… it may just be that my laptop is a little weak but I’m worried that if the tournament machine is under heavy load it may cause bots to skip turns also (maybe due to a memory IO error or something else???)…

when I run the same 2 bots against each other (neither bot having any randomness programmed in) I get the following:

1st what the result should be:

and then the same test again with an error:

I see on the 2nd run there is an error:

but on the 1st there is no error on round 31:

my bots are written in JavaScript… I don’t know if anyone else with a js bot has come across this problem? or bots in any other languages?

[pierre.roux]

Hi @Andre

To put your mind at ease, I also use JS bots for testing the new features we add into the game (it’s easy to mold JS bots into testers for this purpose ) and I never get the execution failed error on them. This might very well be due to slow I/O if many processes are hogging your resources.

As for the tournament runner, it only runs each bot alone after killing any other bot’s process. This ensures that each bot gets access to all the resources just for itself when it is its turn.

Try and have a look at the BotOutput.txt file, as this should contain the stdout or stderr that NodeJS would print errors to. Or else check if the file write library gets “overloaded” in any way (this is just speculation), so test setTimeout(() => { mainFunctionHere(); }, 100); in the bot to see if you can replicate it with such delay.

If you can find a way to easily replicate this bug please let us know.

[rfnel]

I see it on occasion with Java as well.

[pierre.roux]

Release 3.0.0

New version 3.0.0 for the Game Engine, Game Runner and Starter Pack.

Download the new version here

Release notes

• Added The Iron Curtain
  • Protects you against all missiles and Tesla Tower strikes entering your base
  • Costs 100 energy to activate
  • Lasts 6 rounds
  • Only available every 30 rounds (Use it or lose it)
• Price changes
  • Tesla Tower build cost reduced to 100 energy

[rfnel]

Some interesting changes, thanks Pierre.

Just to confirm - does the energy cost for firing a Tesla tower remain the same as before?

[pierre.roux]

Yes, it still costs 100 energy to when a Tesla Tower fire. You can verify any such prices in the game-config.properties file in the starter-pack zipfile.

We hope these changes will bring more variance to the game, and open up new strange strategies. With the final tournament being so close, we want to give everyone a stable game-engine to practice and build their bots for the last push, but if horrible bugs are uncovered, we will gladly fix them ASAP

[japes]

@pierre.roux small bug - the iron curtain stats as given to the bots in state.json don’t agree with the info in game-config.properties. Seems like the engine is using the values in game-config.properties though.

[pierre.roux]

@japes thanks
That is correct, the ironCurtainStats is not accurate. Please use the real values that are those used/described by the game-config.properties file

You can track progress here: https://github.com/EntelectChallenge/2018-TowerDefence/issues/115

[japes]

@pierre.roux another one (I think) - looks like the construction score for the iron curtain isn’t being applied? Maybe this was deliberate?

[pierre.roux]

Thanks, got it in the pull request now
That is one that technically changes gameplay, so we will definitely have a new minor release with the iron curtain construction score fix in. But I would like to wait a week in case any other bugs are uncovered.

[japes]

cool, that makes sense

[thinus]

I appear to have a problem with Release 3.0.0 The Iron wall was not acticated, but the Tesla tower did not wipe out the opponent buildings. Should the Tesla Tower not destroy the opponent buildings before it is destroyed?

[thinus]

Hi
sorry. I found the problem.

[pierre.roux]

No worries, we really appreciate catching bugs before the big tournament.

I see the problem was that Player A did not have at least 100 energy for the Tesla Tower to fire

[rm2k]

when are the iron curtain stats fixes going live? I coded ( i.e. I didn’t hard code them in) with the hope that we’ll get the release just in time before the last tournament.

[pierre.roux]

Before the end of this week we will make a minor release with those changes:smile:

I imagine a temporary workaround is to set the values of the ironCurtainStats object to the new values at the start of your bot, and just use the json object as normal (which will have ironCurtainStats overwritten)…after the release you can just remove the overwriting code.

[thinus]

Hi

I still seem to have the problem with 3.0.0 with Tesla

[pierre.roux]

On round 45 Player A had 109 energy. I see Player A constructed a new Defence building at [5,7], costing 30 energy to build. So during that round, the build command was executed first, and afterwards the Tesla Tower checked to fire, but failed since at that time Player A only had 79 energy in reserve.

Player energy income is given at the very end of every round, so the amount of energy you have to use at round 46 is the amount displayed in the previous round.