Battleground

Table of contents

• Introduction
• System configuration
• Game rules
  • Programming the tank bot
• Running matchs

Introduction

A turn based tank game for Python bots

System configuration

This is the configuration for development. Make sure you have a virtualenv. You need to do the following:

• Install the dependencies running pip install -r requirements.txt
• Create the database running python manage.py migrate
• Create an admin user with python manage.py createsuperuser
• We need Bower intalled, if we have it we can run this: python manage.py bower install
• Run the development server python manage.py runserver
• Open the browser at http://127.0.0.1:8000/

##Intall Bower##

• Fedora

  sudo yum install npm
  sudo npm install -g bower

• Ubuntu

  sudo apt-get install npm
  sudo npm install -g bower

In Ubuntu 14.04 we need do this

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

Game rules

The game is simple, you will program a tank-bot that should destroy the oponent's tank. The game is by turns, and in each turn the tank has three possible actions to take:

• Shoot: The tank can fire a projectile against its enemy target. That will cause two possible results:
  • The projectile hits the enemy, reducing its life by a certain amount.
  • The projectile misses it and nothing happens.
• Move: The tank can move forward or back, but only one step per turn.
• Do Nothing: Pretty self explanatory. Nothing happens here.

The game ends when one of the tanks is destroyed, i.e: its life reaches 0 points; or when 100 turns are played, in which case the winning tank is the one which has more lives at that moment.

Programming the tank bot

The user must define a class called Bot that implements the method evaluate_turn, which receives the following parameters:

• feedback: The result of the previous turn. For instance, the shoot action 'SUCESS' is returned if the enemy is hit, and 'FAILED' otherwise.
• life: Current tank life. A number between 0-100.

Taking this game status as an input, the method should evaluate programmatically the best strategy for the tank; and then return a dictionary indicating what the tank will do in its turn. For this, the player has a few options:

• Move: Return a dictionary like this {'ACTION': 'MOVE', 'WHERE': 1}, where 1 is for moving forward and -1 is for moving backwards.
• Shoot: Return a dictionary like this {'ACTION': 'SHOOT', 'ANGLE': 35, 'VEL': 100} where ANGLE values must be between 0 and 89 and VEL must be between 0 and 100.
• Stay: Player decides not doing anything, so it returns an empty dictionary.

IMPORTANT

Code used to implement evaluate_turn must run in PyPy. For security reasons, this code runs in a PyPy Sandbox, so keep in mind that modules like random or time are not available, so you must figure out how to live with that :P

Running the Celery worker for running matches:

celery -A battleground worker -l info