Using the RoboTour Visualization

The RoboTour Visualization is a new feature of RoboTour 3.1, which was previously only known as a command line program. It provides all features of the (now deprecated) RoboView, such as tournament setup, control and visualization in two or three dimensions, but also many others, such as debugging robots. Comparing to RoboCom Workshop, only the option set editor and the source editor are missing. Of course, it keeps RoboTour's great simulation speed. And it contains the first native RoboCom debugger for Linux!

With all these news, RoboTour 3.1 is still fully backwards compatible to its predecessors. The command line interface has even been extended with new options and is still available for scripting and use in automatic tournaments (such as the Eternal Competition). The visualization mode is started only when the command line option -vis, or no command line options at all are given.

Overview

The RoboTour visualization window contains the following important parts:
All of these components will be described in more detail in the following sections.

Setting up tournaments (Setup dialog)

The tournament setup dialog will be opened automatically when RoboTour starts, but you can always start a new tournament using the menu option Tournament > New....

Note: Even if you press Cancel in the setup dialog, the current tournament will still be aborted.

The top half of the setup dialog lists the participating programs in the new tournament. You will need to add some programs by clicking the + button and selecting the robot files. Robots can also be removed from the tournament using the - button. The robots can be reordered using the Up and Down buttons. (This will only matter for the 'First against all' mode or for sound output, which is always played from the view of the first robot. Of course, that should be yours.)

You can set tournament options in the lower half. Probably most important is the option set. You need to use the same option set as your target competition uses, otherwise results will not be comparable. For example, the Classic Competition uses classic.rco, while the World Cup uses rc3s.rco. (These are both installed along with RoboTour.)

The tournament type is also important. You can select "First against all", which simulates only the first bot in the robot list against all others, "Everyone against everyone", which simulates a full tournament (that might take some time), and "All in one", which loads all the programs in one simulation.

To make the simulation results more expressive, all matches between programs are repeated several times.

If a sound card is available on your system and RoboTour knows how to use it (Hint: You will need to install the play program if using Linux), you can enable sound output during the tournament. The first bot's success will be reported when it has finished a simulation. Sound output can help you to know how your bot is doing while working on other tasks and having RoboTour in the background.

You can also create profiles of the participating robots. They will show how often certain instructions are executed, or how much time is spent executing them. You can even measure the failure ratio of CREATE and TRANS instructions. The profiles will be saved wherever your robots are located, for each robot file x.rob the text version profile.x.rob and the HTML version profile.x.html will be generated. Existing profiles will be overwritten.

When you are happy with your settings, press Start to begin the tournament.

The toolbar (Managing your tournament)

The toolbar is used to control the tournament's progress. Use the Play button to start the next simulation, or use the 'play locker' to start simulations automatically. To control the simulation speed, you can use the speed slider and the slow-motion button, which switches to slow tournament execution (so that you can supervise every single cycle). The Pause button freezes the current situation and is very useful for analyzing it using the debugger. The Abort button stops the current simulation and declares it a tie.

The rest of the buttons control the visualization mode. You can select between no visualization (which means fastest possible simulation of the tournament), two-dimensional visualization (similar to RoboCom Workshop) and three-dimensional visualization. (The last option requires OpenGL drivers for your graphics card. On Linux, you will also have to use glrobotour instead of robotour.)

Note: To rotate the three-dimensional visualization, press the left mouse button and drag your mouse around. By pressing the right mouse button and moving up and down, you can zoom the view. (You can also use the mouse wheel.) Note also that inactive robots are shown darker in the three-dimensional visualization. The instruction set of the robot is shown using textures: The Basic instruction set is plastic, the advanced instruction set is wood, and the super instruction set is steel. Depending on your graphics card, you may want to enable the menu option Options > High 3D Quality, which makes the robots look rounder, but consumes more processor power.

In both of the visualization modes, you can click on a robot to open a debugger.

The information panel (Tournament status)

The information panel shows the tournament's current status. The top-most line shows the current simulation, and how many simulations the tournament has in total. The second line shows the current simulation cycle, and the timeout.

The list below contains information about all participating programs. The current colour and program name are shown for every program. The following columns list the number of wins, losses, ties and points the program has gained so far during the tournament. If the program is currently active in a simulation, the last column shows the number of robots it currently has.

The history panel shows a chart of the number of bots which the programs had during the current simulation. That graph can often be quite interesting.

The message window (Robot errors)

The message window lists all enabled robot errors, that means, fatal errors which cause a robot to die. As robots keep dying all the times (a RoboCom field is a hard place to live), the list would quickly overflow if you couldn't filter out the most interesting events. This can be done using the menu option Options > Robot errors....

Occasionally, errors in RoboTour itself may happen, such as programs that cannot be loaded. They will be listed in the message window too.

The robot debugger

Whenever a simulation is running (or paused), you can open a debugger on any robot by clicking on it. You may open any number of debuggers at the same time, however this will slow down the simulation quite a bit. The debugger will show all relevant information about the robot: