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Many years ago, just as I was getting started with programming, I ran into some programming games in the style of CRobots (I don't think it actually was CRobots, but a clone of sorts) which were pretty cool to play around with.

Recently I've gotten a feeling of "programming is work, not play", which I would rather get rid of, so I figured what would be better than to challenge my colleagues to a competition of who can make the best robot.

However, with many different levels of experience, and many different preferences with regards to programming language, I would rather not tie the competition to a single language. The ones I found after a late night of googling seem to be tied to a single language, and even the ones that are based on Java (like Robocode) seem to have problems trying to use Jython or other JVM-based languages (that in theory should work).

Are there any games of this type out there that is not restricted to a single language?

Andrew Eisenberg
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Epcylon
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  • +1 for remembering crobots. :) – Dave Sherohman Apr 18 '09 at 22:54
  • I'm also searching for this. Finding a lot of language-specific ones, like this list: https://www.moregameslike.com/robocode/ ...a bit tempted to take JsBattle and make it socket-based instead... – fiddur Dec 01 '18 at 09:05
  • This question is almost a decade old, but I don't think the situation is much improved. I have made an attempt at building one of my own, which is almost working: https://bitbucket.org/mortenlj/codetanks – Epcylon Dec 01 '18 at 16:27

2 Answers2

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After more digging, I have found two projects that seems to be fairly mature: IWOR and RealTimeBattle, which both are based on simple messaging systems for the robots to communicate with a server that controls the battle.

This means you can implement a robot in any language you want, as long as it can support sockets (for IWOR) or stdin/stdout (for RTB).

Todd Owen
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Epcylon
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    I was a bit hasty. RTB seems to be so matured it's dead (and wont compile), while IWOR isn't quite the type of game I was looking for (there's no shooting at other robots for instance ;). – Epcylon Apr 19 '09 at 12:34
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Robocode will become .NET enabled soon. And there is good potential for other languages for JVM.

Pavel Savara
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