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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.