Best programming based games

Question

Back when I was at school  I remember tinkering with a Mac game where you programmed little robots in a sort of pseudo-assembler language which could then battle each other  They could move themselves around the arena  look for opponents in different directions  and fire some sort of weapon  Pretty basic stuff  but I remember it quite fondly  even if I can t remember the name   Are there any good modern day equivalents

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Omega is one of them  I played it on C64

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There s racing car simulator game TORCS also where on top of the typical end user playing it  you actually  driving  the cars   you can program robots which control the cars  Regular races are held between robots created by different people

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A game in which you have to graphically construct and train artificial neural networks in order to control a bug is Bug Brain   Bug Brain screen shot http   www infionline net  wtnewton oldcomp bugbrain jpg

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Another good one is CEEBot   It teaches C   Java style programming in a fun  robot-programming kind of game   It is aimed at 10-15 year olds  but it is a good one

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For a modern equivalent  check out CodeRally  it s a Java programming challenge where you write a class to control a race car  The car drives around a track trying to hit check points  refilling when the gas tank runs low  and avoiding obstacles  I think you can throw tires at your opponents  You can run a tournament with several players submitting code to a central server   There are several other programming games listed on IBM s high school outreach page  including Robocode that others already mentioned

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The game was Robowar--I used to play a bit back in college  Here s the wiki for it  I guess it s now open source and available on windows

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Kara is about programming a bug    coming up in various versions  e g  Finite State Machine  Java  Turing Machine  Multithreading  Kara http   www swisseduc ch compscience karatojava kara icons kara-worldeditor gif

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Colobot  It s usually easy for new programmers to pick up on languages like C   when you have a strong understanding of Java basics  Colobot allows you to program automated craft using a language almost identical to Java and to move  sense  and manipulate their environment in order to accomplish missions on a dangerous planet

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Another game in this vein is Origin s Omega  Tanks are constructed on a budget  and then the user programs them in a BASIC-like language with a structured editor  The tanks battle on fields with varying terrain

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I was also keen on these kind of games  One modern example which I have used is http   www robotbattle com   There are various others - for example the ones listed at http   www google com Top Games Video Games Simulation Programming Games Robotics

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I d say the most famous programming game there has been is the core wars  I don t know if you can still find active  rings  although there was a lot when I tried it some time ago  4 or 5 years

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There s also mySQLgame  I found it pretty amusing  shortly after finding out I suck    Here s what Casual Gameplay has to say about it

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I think  NET Terrarium is one of the best  learn-to-program  games for the  NET platform

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http   en wikipedia org wiki Hacker  computer game   http   en wikipedia org wiki Hacker 2  There is also a great hacking game the name of which I simply cannot remember  Hrm

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Just found Light Bot   Program your robot to move around and perform tasks to complete a puzzle   Even includes subroutines  Program the bot by dragging tiles into slots  The game is very polished   Update Lightbot is now the most recent version of the game  and has versions specifically designed for kids ages 4-8 or ages 9   with no upper limit  and also features kind of an if  screen of lightbot 1 http   www lostateminor com wp-content uploads 2008 10 light-bot jpg

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I m surprised that Space Chem isn t mentioned yet  Programming with symbols  but programming nevertheless   http   spacechemthegame com

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While it was more logic than programming per se  one I really enjoyed back in elementary school was Rocky s Boots   It had sensors  AND gates  OR gates  NOT gates  wires  timers  and all sorts of other stuff   Fantastic program for teaching a kid logic   Go to the link and you can still play it

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AI Bots II is a programmer s game  Instead of playing the game directly  players are required to write a program to do it   There is an arena where two teams of players  called bots  are loaded  Each team needs one program  multiple instances of which will control each player of that team        You write your program in C C    Your program runs parallely with the game    copied this description directly from the game homepage

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The game in question was definitely Robowar for the Mac  My son had a lot of fun with it and went on to program real robots    As mentioned earlier by Proud  there is a wiki page for it  http   en wikipedia org wiki RoboWar  Although there has not been a lot of activity surrounding the game over the last few years  there was a tournament held recently  and there is a yahoo email group

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I ve never heard or Core Wars before  but it looks interesting  I do have to vouch for RoboCode  though  That s fun and challenging  especially if you have a group of people competing against either other

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http   www pythonchallenge com   highly addictive  and a great way to learn python

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I played RoboWar  but the programming game I remember on the Mac was Chipwits  It came out in 1984  Completely graphical  but entertaining  From what I ve seen of Lego Mindstorms  the programming style is similar

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I ve been trying to find the original game I was thinking of - I think it was called  bots or something like that  and ran on my Mac back in around system 6 days  I ll have to do some digging next time I m back at my parents place   Thinking more about it over the last day or so  I suppose it s really not all that different to writing brains for bolo  http   www lgm com bolo   or bots for Quake and those sort of games

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You must be thinking of RoboWar  Oh how lovely it is   Still exists  though the community is slowly dying   http   robowar sourceforge net RoboWar5 index html http   tech groups yahoo com group robowar

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I have so far found the game Cells to be quite satisfying   The whole object of the game is to program a  hive mind   which is capable of surviving  breeding  and destroying its enemies   Lots are good  minds  are provided by the author and various contributors  and it s easy to write others by looking at them   However  the author seems to be progressing on it very slowly - the last commit was about a year ago

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In Grobots you give a program for various types of robots in your army  think gatherers  fighters  builders   And the best  they can replicate  Comes with its own programming language

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I think the original game was called Core Wars  this Wikipedia article contains a lot of interesting links   there still seem to be programs and competitions around  for example at corewars org  I never had the time to look into these games  but they seem like great fun

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If you want to step away from your keyboard  Wizards of the Coast relased a game called RoboRally that is a combative programming board game   http   www wizards com roborally

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Planetwars is a game specifically written for Google Ai Contest  bots are controlling fleets for conquering planets  they support many languages

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There is a Spanish Java Page who organice a football leage in wich the users program the skills of their team and the strategy  You only need to download the framework and implement a little interface  then you can simulate matchs which are seen in the screen  When you are happy with your team and strategy you submit the code to the page and enters in the tournament   Tutorials  videos and downloads   Java Cup

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My favourite was PCRobots back in the 90 s - you could write your bot in pretty much any language that could compile a DOS executable  Still runs quite nicely in DOSBox

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Core Wars is the classic  of course  But Rocky s Boots is another one  Imagine  There was a time  1982  when you could sell a commercial game based on logic gates

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I have to give a shout out to RobotWar which was the first programming  game  that I played way back in the Apple II days  It was written by Silas Warner of Castle Wolfenstein fame

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I like Ruby Warrior  It is still somewhat under development  but it is a great game with a clever interface

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If you are willing to look at single player games like Light Bot and  Manufactoria then I highly recommend RoboZZle  It has conditional commands which include function calls  This allows for complex stack manipulation  There are thousands of user created puzzles from pathetically obvious to mind blowing enigmas  They have recently added support for smartphones   I also think The Codex of Alchemical Engineering is worth a look

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I used to have a lot of fun coding my own robot with Robocode in college   It is Java based  the API is detailled and it s pretty easy to get a challenging robot up and running   Here is an example      public class MyFirstRobot extends Robot        public void run              while  true                 ahead 100                turnGunRight 360                back 100                turnGunRight 360                           public void onScannedRobot ScannedRobotEvent e             fire 1

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One interesting historical game is the old Robot Odyssey  which was essentially a game where you programmed robots by building logic circuits out of gates and flip flops  I remembered it clearly when I took real EE classes over a decade later

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In the flash game Manufactoria you  program  a factory by laying out the conveyor belts and switches in a way that s very similar to a FSM  but more powerful  This game is really great  Give it a try  especially if you re into formal languages and automata   Manufactoria screen shot http   www tomdalling com wp-content uploads manufactoria-bubble-sort png

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I got myself addicted to uplink a few months ago  It s not really coding based  more hacking  It s still fun and super geeky

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Although not strictly programming-based  I enjoyed a lot Robot Odyssey  a game where you wired logic gates to sensors and motors in a robot  to make it move and react to environment  to get out of a city  escaping obstacles  I played in on Apple   e  it was one of the best games on this computer  with Lode Runner   -

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Matt  I think the game you re referring to is CRobots  or one of its clones  perhaps -- my first contact was with PRobots  in Pascal  if I remember correctly   It was a lot of fun

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Core Wars

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Carnage Heart for PlayStation was fun  It would let you program little mechs to do battle using a flow diagram

[artificial-intelligence] Best programming based games

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