The Corewar project is the final exercice from the Algorithm branch at 42. Core War is a programming game in which several programs battle for domination in a virtual computer using a limited set of instructions. Students must build the arena, develop a champion and an interpreter to convert it into a binary. This project is relatively straight-forward but requires a complete reading of the documentation and a precise implementation.
Subject: English
- Compilation
- Simplistic virtual machine
- Simplistic assembly type language - Lexer / Parser
- Visual render in C via SDL2
- Reverse engineering
- Organization and team work
- Algorithms & AI
We provided a shell script to install the SDL depencies.
sh virtual_machine/visualizator/sdl2_dependencies.sh
First of all, open a terminal, go into the project and build it:
make -j8
To start a game you need at least a compiled champion file (.cor), you can create one from a redcode assembly file (.s) with the compiler:
./asm champion.s
Valid exemples .s files are given into the exemples_s folder.
Once you have your champion, you can make him play alone or compete with a maximum of 3 other champions (maximum number of players along many other variables can be changed inside op.h).
./corewar champion.cor other_champion.cor
You can also use a few options:
• -n followed by a number to set the number of the next player. This number impacts the turn order (biggest to smallest):
./corewar a.cor -n 3 b.cor c.cor
Here 'a' will be set to 1, 'b' to 3 and 'c' to 2, 'b' will play first then 'c', then 'b' (consult the subject for more informations).
• -dump32 or -dump64 followed by a number to stop the game at the beginning of the given cycle and print out the memory in hexadecimal (0 being the first cycle). The suffix 32 or 64 is just for the number of characters displayed on each line.
./corewar champion.cor -dump64 42
• -visu to activate the visualizer:
./corewar champion.cor -visu
Hard to understand what happened without the visualizer or the dump option, here are how they render:
Each player is represented in a color. Every CYCLE_TO_DIE, they need to tell the VM that they are alive or theyvwill be eleminated.
Every cycle, the VM check if some action need to be done.
This is almost the end, you can see that Helltrain is pretty much controling most of the map. CYCLE_TO_DIE is slowly decreasing so player need te be reported alive more often.
