Planet Wars: Common Lisp Starter Package, part 2

It took a while but Common Lisp is finally supported on the official Planets Wars game server (Google AI Challenge)! (In the meantime one could use dhartmei's server (and you still can since it offers some advantages like more games in a shorter time).)

Both Gábor Melis and I updated our starter packages which can be found here:

• http://quotenil.com/Planet-Wars-Common-Lisp-Starter-Package-Actually-Works.html
  
• http://ai-contest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=421&p=4494#p4494
  

My starter package has been improved a little since earlier versions (most importantly no reliance on *features* anymore) and it comes with a silly bot that is currently slowly climbing the ranks: http://ai-contest.com/profile.php?user_id=4055

Planet Wars: Common Lisp Starter Package (Google AI Challenge)

The Google AI Challenge should start any day now and I and "anwyn" have both made Common Lisp starter packages. anwyn's follows the API of the other starter packages more and is perhaps a little more lispier (I like LOOP a lot) and mine's a little more bare-bones: just the basic communication with the game server and a silly example and you have to do the rest.

One little extra in my starter package is a "proxy bot". Since the initial starter packages use conventional languages, developing and running the bot is also pretty conventional: a basic edit, compile, run (crash, coredump) loop. The proxy bot takes it on himself to be the one that's started up and shut down every time[1] instead of your real bot, so you can keep the latter running in an, in my case, Emacs + Slime session.

(I don't have to tell the advantages of this to this audience.)

This proxy bot is perhaps useful to people writing their bots in Clojure and Scheme (and Haskell?) as well. Although they will have to adapt their main loop a little to allow for socket communications besides the normal way of talking to the game server.

Also, there's an unofficial server on which you can test your bot against others: http://www.benzedrine.cx/planetwars/

[1] You don't really have a choice with the Planet Wars game engine.

New Google AI Challenge: Planet Wars

There's a new Google AI Challenge: Planet Wars.

It seems they're also working on adding support for Common Lisp due to the number of people that used it in the last challenge. Awesome!