Iceberg Races

On Friday night (April 9th), I held my second programming competition at NDSU. This year’s turnout was much better than last year.

The Game

Iceberg Races is you’re run of the mill racing game. Players control a car which they try to navigate through the race to complete laps. When the game starts, the players are sent a copy of the map, and during each turn, they are provided location and velocity details for all the vehicles on the track. The competitor’s goal was to write an AI to find the best path through the map to win the race.

Participants

This year 22 people participated, including students from NDSU, MSUM, and Concordia. I believe all of the participants were undergraduates. All competitors came in blind. The only details that were released about the game ahead of time were clients were being provided in both Java and Python.

Problems

I was in contact with the NDSU ACM which arranged all the logistics of the actual event. They reserved rooms, provided advertising, and setup the competition computers. I had told them I needed Python and Pygame installed on the server machine. Upon launching the game, it was immediately discovered that I needed Python 2.6 and the server had 2.5.7. We spent the better part of half an hour trying to get 2.6 to install (it was not in the repositories for the distro). We eventually gave up and my laptop became the game server.

There were problems distributing the client source files. I had packaged Python and Mercurial binary libraries for use with Windows machine development (which I neglected to remove after learning the competition was being held in a Linux computer lab), this pushed the size of the source zip file from 500 Kb to 54MB. SimpleHTTPServer (Python library server) immediately crashed handling the sudden load from the downloads.

Competition

After five hours of development, all coding work came to a stop and the competition bracket was drawn up and the fierce battles began. Several clients performed excellently, some drove randomly, and a few simple spun in place. Overall, everyone had a great time watching the matches.

Winners

Source Code

Full source code for the server and clients, as well as all game artwork can be found in the mercurial repository hosted on Assembla.

hg pull http://hg.assembla.com/icedberg_races

I’ve also included the source for the first and second place clients (both part of the Java client).

Usage:

Clients:

java Main <name> <server IP> <server port> [ai, first, second]

python Main.py <name> <server IP> <server port>

Server:

python Main.py <port>

Acknowledgements