Roboforge For Sale

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

**Edit: Follow link in message below. DON’T REPLY here… I posted without reading through enough forums :slight_smile: **

Just got an email about the Roboforge guys wanting to sell their entire business. See: http://www.roboforge.net/tender.htm

Roboforge is a cool game and online arena in which you build robots and program the logic for them then let them try to kill each other. Their were cash prizes for the online tournaments. It was one of the first games I know of that used Java 3D.

It’s not that spectacular to watch the fights, but the UI for building and programming robots was quite nice and it was fun if you like the idea of pitting your code against someone else’s… it basically is an extension of other “coder vs. coder” games, like core wars, or jrobots. Perhaps a bit similar to MindRover: The Europa Project.

I wish the team success in whatever they choose to do after Roboforge. I hope they haven’t given up on Java Gaming.

#2

http://www.java-gaming.org/cgi-bin/JGNetForums/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=1068664172

I personally never felt that RoboForge was cool. Yes, the UI is nice - but the robot fights? I never had the feeling to have any control of the things going on.

#3

As SWP said, its a coder game.

Not everyones cup of tea but there’s a fine tradition in them going back as old as computer games themselves. (Anyone else play CoreWars? :slight_smile: )

And its a particularly nice example. 99.99% Java/Java3D (they went outsdie Java for a decent timer, thats it.) It got a phenomenal 87% rating from PC gamer (Quake got like a 90%.) They called it “best of breed.”

#4

CoreWars offered immediate feedback. Thats a big contrast to RoboForge! There has been only a very loose coupling - if any - of what you configure/code and what happens on the screen very much later. The feedback has been poor. Maybe some possibilities for post-battle analysis would have been nice.

I won and lost some battles w/o the slightest idea why. What went wrong, what could be better? This does not help to keep motivation high.

#5

Did you use the “simulator” in the workshop?

Thats how I debugged my robot. It’s basically a robot debugger that lets you trace through a combat round.

Yes though it would have been nice if you could have played tournament rounds back in the simulator to analyze them.