Now for something quite different from the philosophical entries I’ve been writing recently. We finally got the time to release the game “JTron” on Sourceforge. It is there under its new name Jtronic.
This game is designed for programming competitions; participants program an agent that plays the game by obtaining information about its environment and making decisions. The programming language is Java. The game itself combines features of Pac-man and Tron in what we think is an interesting synthesis.
This game was used for the ACM-ICPC regional contest in Tokyo 2010, for the “Java Challenge” part. I’ve had the honour to work with some great people in the Honiden lab in developing this game, and we spent time on it on and off for almost a year. A very educational process, and the final result was not bad at all.
If you can program in Java, you can have fun with this framework by programming your own agent and competing against others (including some pre-made ones that are included in the release), or you can contribute to the game framework itself, should you feel so inclined. It’s GPL licensed. The documentation is still slightly sparse, but we will release more “shortly”.
A similar framework is the “Icy Challenge” that was used in the world final ICPC Java Challenge. It has much nicer graphics than our game. Maybe someone would take the time to make 3D graphics for JTronic?
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