More battling bots with Marvin's Arena

Want some more fun coding battling bots? Want to take it to the next level and have tournaments of battling bots? Want to code your bots in C#, VB.Net or C++? Be able to easily edit maps? Have a built in code editor? Watch the battles in 2D or 3D? And have the source for it all?

Marvin's Arena

Marvin's Arena is a free and entertaining programming game. The game is designed to easily learn programming in any .NET compatible language. It is suited for new programmers to gain experience with the .NET languages and development tools as well as for experienced programmers to enhance efficient development.

You create a robot and let it fight against one or more opponents in a tournament. The first robot can be written in only a few minutes but complex robots might take some time for perfection. More experienced developers can even create robots working in a team to fight other teams.

The robots can move, scan for opponents and fire bullets and rockets to survive in the battle!

About Marvin's Arena

• Getting Started - What is Marvin's Arena and what can you do with it
• Features - Currently available features
• System Requirements - System requirements
• About - Further information about the author and tools

Downloading and Installing

• Installing Visual Studio - Install Visual Studio
• Downloading and Installing Marvin's Arena - Install Marvin's Arena and Visual Studio Starter Kit
• Setting Up Your Robot - Create your first robot project
• Share - Share your robot with other developers

Creating Robots

• Tutorials - Different level tutorials
• FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
• Code Snippets - Useful and less useful code snippets

Tournament

• Ladder - Ranking of the best robots

Development

• Roadmap - Release and feature plan
• Framework Architecture - Documentation of the architecture of Marvin's Arena

Marvin's Arena (CodePlex)

This is the source code of the engine and backend if you just want to create robots please visit the project website!

Current Features
* Battle Manager to create a tournament
* 3D Battle Engine that simulates the tournament
* Sandbox to run every robot in a secured environment with maximum security assigned
* Single and Team tournaments with full tournament brackets
* Configurable game rules
* XML tournament result
* Map Editor
* Visual Studio integration and Code Editor

Note, if you want to run the engine via the source (i.e. from the CodePlex source code), take a quick read of the Documentation. Also when I grabbed the latest check-in, there was a couple things I had to tweak to get it to compile and run.

a) Change the Start-Up project to MarvinsArina

b) Grab a copy of of the ScintillaNet.dll from \Src\Main_VB\MarvinsArena\ and copy it to \Src\Main\MarvinsArena\

c) Make sure the 2DBattleEngine and 3DBattleEngine projects build.

At this point, all was well for me and I was up and running.

Yep, you get this cool app, get to build bots that can kill each other and you get the source for everything too!

Here’s a few more links you might find interesting:

• Building Battling Bots with DumbBots.Net