Using RoboTop

Introduction

Are you tired of waiting up to six hours before you can test your changes to a robot using RobServ? Would you like to test the charts under different option sets? Did you ever want to create a charts for you and your friends only?

It is largely unknown that RoboTour can be used to simulate competitions with charts and detailed lists just like RobServ. Probably because doing so involves lots of commandline parameters, creating folders in a certain structure and copying robots manually into them.

RoboTop was designed to make this process very easy - everyone can setup competitions now. The following RoboTop tutorial will explain all the steps and possibilities.

RoboTop Tutorial

In this tutorial, we will create a local mirror of the RoboCom World Cup, which can be used to test your new bots relatively quickly.
Before starting with RoboTop, you should download the World Cup charts Zip archive (from the RoboCom website) and extract it into a temporary folder.

Initial setup

When RoboTop is started for the first time, a setup dialog pops up automatically and asks for some basic information. Later, it can be accessed by clicking Extras->Settings.... The following items should be configured before creating your first competition:

Creating the Competition

Now we're ready to create our personal World Cup. Select File->New Tournament... and fill the dialog's fields. We'll set the Tournament name to World Cup at first. The settings file name and tournament folder need not be changed, because they are set up automatically. We'll use the default option set, which comes with RoboTour under the name robocom.rco, and with RoboCom WS under the name OptionSets/rc3s.rco. Select either of these using the file selector. Finally, we'll leave the charts size and repeat count at 20 resp. 10 because the 'real' World Cup uses these values too. For your own competitions, you may of course change these values.

Pressing OK creates the new competition and opens its charts window which now shows - no wonder - an empty charts list.

Adding robots

It's time to fill the empty charts now. It is very easy to add robots to the competition: Just click the Add Bot button (or select Tournament->Add Robots..., browse to the folder which contains the extracted World cup archive, select all the files and press Open. A new window appears - labelled Insert View - which displays status information and RoboTour's output when the simulations are run. Press Start to run the required simulations with RoboTour. 

When RoboTour is finished (and the progress bar shows 100%), you can safely close the Insert View and return to the charts window. You should see a table which looks similar to the Internet World Cup's charts. (There may be small differences in ranking, though, as RoboCom uses random numbers.)

Removing Robots

It sometimes happens that you load a wrong bot - or several versions of the same bot - into a competition. You can then drop it from the charts by selecting it and clicking Delete Bot (or choosing Tournament->Remove Robot).

Detailed Results

By double-clicking a robot (or selecting it and choosing Tournament->View Details), you can have a look at its detailed results against the others. You can quickly proceed to other robot's detailed results by double-clicking them in the detailed view.

Result Matrix

Do you need a quick overview of your competition? Just click View Matrix or choose Tournament->View Matrix and you'll see all the results on one screen.

View in Browser

RoboTop can also create web pages for your competition results, which you can easily share with friends or upload to a web server. To create these, click Redisplay in the charts table (or select Tournament->Redisplay ). That creates all the results pages. Afterwards, click View in Browser (Tournament->View in Browser) to point your web browser to the charts page. The command is also available for the detailed result pages.