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