Netrobots

About

CROBOTS is a programming game first released as shareware by Tom Poindexter in December 1985, an MS-DOS program for IBM PC compatibles. Netrobots is a networked robot-programming game based on CROBOTS: robots written in C connect as clients to a graphical server and fight each other. Its game logic was designed from scratch based on the CROBOTS manual, and it currently only builds on macOS.

How it differs from the original

Bugs and exact timings of CROBOTS are not emulated, robots run concurrently rather than time-shared (so computation is effectively free), angles are measured clockwise, and a division by zero kills a robot instead of restarting it.

Getting started

Run make to build the server and sample robots, then start a match with the included fight script, passing the robot programs to pit against each other. Five sample robots are included; one of them, 'rabbit', never shoots and is meant for training your own robots, and robot programming is documented in the included LaTeX manual.

History

It started as a group project for a C programming course at the University of Lugano, written by seven third-semester students in a week, working about 2-3 hours a day.

Status & roadmap

• The README lists open tasks such as a Windows port, client libraries in other languages and a compatibility layer for running old CROBOTS code.

Licensing & legal

• The server is released under the GPL, while the sample robots and client library are in the public domain.