Martin Pitt » asteroids http://www.piware.de addicted to Ubuntu development Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:55:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Asteroids bot submitted, publishing source http://www.piware.de/2008/07/asteroids-bot-submitted-publishing-source/ http://www.piware.de/2008/07/asteroids-bot-submitted-publishing-source/#comments Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:10:45 +0000 pitti http://martinpitt.wordpress.com/?p=13 A while ago I blogged about my participation in the c’t programming contest to write a bot that plays against the 1979 Atari console.
Submission deadline was June 30th, and the results are trickling in now.

I am on rank 104, which I’m more than satisfied with. Unsurprisingly I didn’t make the top 50, I spent way too little time on it. But I had lots of fun with it, I have something that works, and at least outperforms my own Asteroids skills :-)

In case anyone is interested in it, the source code is on http://piware.de/bzr/ct-asteroids/. It’s a bzr branch, so you can bzr get the directory.

]]> http://www.piware.de/2008/07/asteroids-bot-submitted-publishing-source/feed/ 1 My computer discovered playing games http://www.piware.de/2008/05/my-computer-discovered-playing-games/ http://www.piware.de/2008/05/my-computer-discovered-playing-games/#comments Wed, 07 May 2008 09:54:35 +0000 pitti http://martinpitt.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/my-computer-discovered-playing-games/ The other day I read about the current c’t programming contest and got addicted immediately. The task is to create a program which plays the Atari Asteroids game from 1979:

Unfortunately they do not send that gem to everyone :-) , but they do send the original 8 KB of ROM, so you can play it on the MAME emulator.

So far I got the emulator and the game running, and have a Python script which tracks the objects and their velocity vectors. I spent half of the weekend doing the vector analysis bits with good old pencil and paper. Reviving all the maths bits from school (about 11 years ago) was a lot of fun! Now I have useful formulas for determining the shooting angle to hit a moving comet from a moving and decelerating ship, determining if and when two moving objects with given radius collide, etc. In my head I have a first cut of a strategy, too.

Now I just need to find some time to actually implement all of this…

Once the contest is over, I’ll publish my sources, in case anyone else is interested.

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