hacker.org

I recently joined the site, and am allready more or less addicted to it. After downloading the SDK and reading the documentation, I'm still having a few questions.

One main thing is I can't find anything about the stats of city's. How hard get they hit by each weapon, do they also get bonusses/penalties for being on certain terrain?

A second thing are the setup parameters of the game. When I check replays on the site, I always see 7 city's, and it seems to me the boardsize is always the same. The main question with this is, is this always like that, or is it planned to have different starting values. It mainly raises questions because the boardsize is passed to every function.

The main reason for those questions is actually knowing what the exact challenge is to do. Is it the idea to make the best bots, for any environment, with variable parameters for certain things, or is the competition about having the best bot for a specific setup. If it is the first, it seems to me that battles should also be executed with some kind of random parameters, if it is the second, my feeling is that as much as possible of the environment should be given, or at least have it stated somewhere, so that it is up to us to find out, as some kind of challenge, the values.

hi karian, welcome to the site! these are all excellent comments and questions.

the quick story is that i left these parameters as variables originally, not being sure of optimal values for the game. at the moment, i'm inclined to formalize them as concrete, as nobody has expressed much interest in having them vary. the game seems to be rich enough with the current setup that adding more configurations is probably not necessary.

so, to answer your questions (i will include these answers in future sdk docs):
cities do not get affected by terrain
the damage cities take is the Damage line of the unit types table
there are always 7 cities, and the world is always 50x50

adum

thanks for the info.

one more remark. Or the table, or the example you give is wrong in the documentation. You say that a grunt does 2x damage against a hovercraft in the example, while according to the table, it is 2.5x. I guess you updated the table with new values, and are forgotten to change the example.

cool, thanks. fixed in next release.

adum

i got some questions

when i load the RunSimulator.class file in eclipse i just get an error!?
"The class file viewer cant handle the given input"
shouldnt there be some project file? documentation says to load the class file!?

why cant i just print out debug stuff and it appears in the VM console? like

System.out.println("Hello World!");

results in a line like

PLAYER RED: Hello World!

any other tips/hints for setting up a bot-production environment?

A small typo: in the README, in the description of the Unit "think" Method, the information sent about nearby units is "objX, objX: positions", and should be "objX, objY: positions".

Also - how exactly does the radio work? Does a signal get received the next clock tick? If the execution limit runs out, do units receive the radio signal from the previous tick?

andreyf -- thanks for the typo fix.

the radio receives whatever was sent on the last tick. a radio broadcast remains in place until changed, so even if a unit doesn't get to think on a given tick, its last radio signal will continue to be emitted.

adum