README.md

Status: Stable and maintained. I will address Issues and Pull requests, but at this point, no new features are planned.

Vindinium starter-kit for Go

This is an alternative Go starter-kit for the Vindinium AI Challenge.

Why another starter-kit?

The official starter-kit for Go is a fine choice; however, I feel that some of the design decisions were not optimal.

Differences

This project has the following differences to the official starter-kit:

• Different Board representation

  The board representation is different. Instead of using interface{} for tiles, tiles are integers that represent the type of tile (Air, Hero, etc.). Hero identity, mine ownership information and tavern locations are available as seperate data structures.

• Separation of client code and bot code

  The code for the actual bot(s) is isolated in a sub-directory, instead of in the same directory as the starter-kit code. This comes at a cost, however, as you must import the starter-kit code, which means that everything is prefixed with vindinium.. That can be a little cumbersome.

• Multi-instance mode

  You can run multiple instances of a bot in parallel.

• Graceful shutdown

  You can interrupt the client with Ctrl-C (SIGTERM) at any time. It will finish the running games and then shut down. If you press Ctrl-C a second time, it will shut down immediately without finishing the current game(s).

• Does not panic

  The official starter-kit will panic (crash) if the server sends an unexpected response (such as a Timeout error or a truncated response).

• Less configurable

  You cannot configure the number of turns or map used for training mode. I consider the default settings good enough.

• Less verbose

  The client does not output anything at all. If you want to see progress updates, statistics or even the viewUrl, your bot must print that itself.

Installation

1. git clone https://github.com/DataWraith/vindinium-starter-go
2. cd vindinium-starter-go
3. go build
4. ./vindinium-starter-go -h

Usage

Client

The client takes the following commandline switches:

• -k <API key>

  Your API key. This option is required.

• -s <Server>

  The server to play on. Defaults to http://vindinium.org.

• -m <mode>

  The game mode. Must be either 'training' or 'arena'. Defaults to 'training'.

• -b <bot name>

  The name of the bot you want to run (defaults to "random"). See below for how to add your own bot.

• -c <number of games>

  How many games you want to play (defaults to 1). If you specify 0 here, the client will continue to play games until interrupted.

  Note that a game will be counted multiple times if more than one instance of the bot participates. That means that if three instances participate in the same game, that game will be counted as three games.

• -j <number of instances>

  How many instances of the bot to run in parallel. Defaults to 1.

  Make sure your machine has enough CPU power to support bots running in parallel, or you may run into timeout issues.

  You probably don't want to run more bots than you have CPU cores, but if you do, make sure that the GOMAXPROCS environment variable is set to a high enough value.

Writing your own bot

Quickstart

The fastest way to get started is to look at the example bots provided in the bots/ directory. Note that you have to register your bot in the file bot_registry.go in order to make it known to the client.

Explanation

To write your own bot, create a directory under bots/. This directory will contain the source code for your bot.

Your bot's code lives in its own package. To interact with the client, you have to import it (import "../../vindinium") and then create a struct that conforms to the vindinium.Bot interface.

type Bot struct {}

To implement the interface, you have to implement two methods:

1. func (b *Bot) Move(s *vindinium.State) vindinium.Direction {}
2. func (b *Bot) EndOfGame(err error, s *vindinium.State) {}

The first method is where the meat of your bot is. It takes a gamestate object and returns your move. The second method is useful for bots that can learn from the game outcome or want to print out statistics of the match -- err is the error that caused the game to be aborted (if any) and s is the last-received gamestate.

After you have written your bot, register it in bot_registry.go and recompile the client with go build.

Take a look at the GoDoc for the starter-kit to see a description of all data structures used and functions provided.

Questions

Feel free to open GitHub issues for any questions you may have.

License

This starter-kit is distributed under the unlicense. See the LICENSE file for more information.