You can simply start RoboTour with some robot files (.ROB or .RBI files) as command line arguments.
Example: robotour ruhe.rbi dj.rbi test.rob
The result is a tournament of all robots specified against all. At the end of the tournament, a table will be shown containing the results of all robots.
Wildcards (*) are permitted, for example, to select all files of one type.
Example: robotour -s thebestbot.rob bots/*.rob top20/*.rbi
As the -s parameter is used in this example, only the first specified robot, thebestbot.rob, will be simulated against all other robots.
You can get more information about possible options by calling robotour without parameters or by reading the following sections.
Mostly, RoboTour will be used to simulate tournaments. There are several standard settings that can be changed:
Tournament configuration options |
|
---|---|
-h | Prints a help screen which shows
all of the options supported by RoboTour. |
-n n | You can change how often each fight will be repeated. Normally, it is ten times like in the Classic competition on the Internet. Example: -n 5 |
-o RCOFile | Set the game settings (timings, ...) file to RCOFile. Normally, the enclosed file robocom.rco is used, which loads the settings of the Classic Competition from the Internet. Example: - o hard.rco |
-r | Disable randomizing. This causes RoboTour to produce the same results every time it is started. |
Mode selection options |
|
-c | Switch to "charts" mode: Simulate every robot against every other robot. This is the standard mode. |
-s | Switch to "single" mode: Simulate only the first robot against all others. Useful for testing new robots. |
-i | Switch to "all-in-one" mode: Load all specified bots into one simulation. |
-t n | Switch to "top n" mode: Create a charts list where it is possible to add robots. If there are more than n robots in the charts, the worst will be dropped. Example: -t 20 |
-T n |
Switches to the "top n" mode, too, however, old
results (partially simulated robots from the last run of RoboTour) are
re-used. |
-cf Folder | Sets the competition folder. That is the folder in which RoboTour looks for robots and results files when using the top mode. Using this switch, you can run top mode competitions from every folder (e.g. the one in which RoboTour is installed.) |
Special RoboTour configuration
options |
|
-v n | Set the verbose level of RoboTour. Normally, this is set to 5, lower values cause less output. Example: -v 2 |
-p n | Print the field every n cycles. The resulting text mode field is not very nice, so the feature is normally deactivated. The visualization mode can do a much better job for this. Example: -p 100 |
-batch | Never pops up any message boxes. This option is useful for batch scripts running RoboTour. (Only the Windows version of RoboTour sometimes pops up message boxes. This setting has no effect under the Unix version.) |
-sound |
Enables sound output. Using this
option, you can listen to the first robot's success even when RoboTour
is running in the background. (In single mode, the first robot is the
one that plays against all others; in top mode, it is the one which
is being added to the competition.) Not all versions of RoboTour
support
sound; it is only supported if it appears on the help screen (-h
). |
-prof Type |
Enables the instruction profiler. Three
different types of profiles can be generated:
|
-vis |
Enables the visualization
mode. RoboTour will launch a graphical window which displays the
tournament. |
robotour bots/*.rbi
robotour -n 5 -o easy.rco -v 2 others/*.rob
robotour -s mybestbot.rob top20/*.rbi
robotour -r -p 100 -v 0 ruhe.rbi dj.rbi > ruhe_dj.log
robotour -t 20 infector.rob
RoboTour supports various tournament modes that are useful for different purposes.
The top mode works like RobServ: it manages a competition with fixed
maximum size. New robots can be added to the competition, and only the
best robots will stay in the charts as soon as the maximum size is
reached. A result HTML
charts file is automatically created whenever robots are added to the
competition;
detailed simulation results pages can be created using the
makehtml program (see below).
RoboTour's top mode is very powerful, for example, the
Eternal Competition is run using RoboTour's top mode.
The detailed procedure to set up a competition is as follows:
The helper program makehtml is used to create HTML results
files
for competitions run using the top mode (see above). Following is a
detailed
description of its command line arguments:
-h |
Prints a help screen which shows all makehtml
command line options. |
-name CompName |
Sets the competition's name to CompName
. The competition name is shown on all HTML pages. |
-cf Folder |
Sets the competition folder to Folder
. That is the folder in which makehtml looks for the result
files
written by RoboTour. If the parameter -cf is not specified,
the
current folder is used. |
-of Folder |
Sets the output folder to
Folder. That
is the folder in which the generated HTML pages are written. It is
usual
to use the same folder as for -cf here. Howeber, if -of
is not specified, the current folder is used. |
-nolinks |
Do not create links to the
detailed
results pages. Normally, makehtml generates links from the
charts
page to the detailed pages, and between the detailed pages. If you'd
like
to publish a single page (for example, the charts page only), these
links
would however lead to nowhere, so here's the option to switch them off.
|
-nodownload |
Do not create links to the robot source files (
.rob / .rbi). Normally, makehtml generates
links to
the robot source files much like RobServ. However it does not encode
.rob files to binary files, so if you do not want to publish the
source
files, you will not want to have download links. |
Any other command line argument (wildcards are permitted) is
interpreted
as a robot file relative to the competition folder, and for this robot,
a
detailed results page is created.
However, you can even start makehtml without any command line
arguments;
in that case, it just creates the charts page.
The HTML pages written by makehtml can now be customized
by editing
the charts.css file which is written to the output folder.
(Note:
makehtml ensures that the file is not overwritten if it
exists,
so your changes will not be lost when re-running makehtml.)
That charts.css file is a standard cascaded stylesheet
file and
can be edited with every plain-text editor. The most interesting thing
you
may want to change are the different colours for current and old
robots.
These are the styles topcur (robots in the charts, played
against
the current version) down to badold (robots which are no
longer
in the charts, and where we've played against an old version only).
Along
with the style title (the table header fields), you may
create an
entirely new color-scheme for your competition.
The helper program kickbot is used to throw robots out of a top-mode
competition.
Well, actually, the robots are only thrown out of the charts, they are
still
left in the competition (results against them still show up in the
detailed
results pages). It is used, for example, when a robot is considered a
simple
copy ("clone") of another previously-existing robot, and is no longer
allowed
to appear in the Eternal Competition.
Kickbot is run with kickbot -cf compFolder badbot.rob,
where
compFolder is the competition folder name as it was given to
robotour, and badbot.rob is the file name of the robot
which
should be thrown out of the charts (relative to the competition
folder).
As usually, kickbot -h gives all possible command line
options.
There's one pitfall with kickbot: it does not recreate the
HTML
result pages, nor recalculate the charts. Of course, you can run makehtml
afterwards to recreate the result pages, and the bad bot will
indeed
vanish from the charts, but some results may be slightly incorrect. The
only
solution is to add a new robot to the competition using robotour
(or simply re-simulate one), which will recalculate the results.
Normally, this is not a problem as most competitions have lots of new
robots
all the time.