battlecode-devs

We haven't before, but we'll be giving it some serious thought now.

Answer from another dev: I definitely remember we had a team called "BattleToads" one year. We've also had similarly-inspired names like "Cattlebode", "Paddlegoats", and "Battlecod"

We sandbox player code by sandboxing it at runtime - you're not allowed to access any tools but the ones we give you, so you can't, say, write files on the match-running servers.

It doesn't always work, though.

Last year's game was about zombies (not cliche at all, right?) They were supposed to show up periodically at spawn points around the map.

It turned out that there was a particular way to escape the sandbox and modify the "zombie spawn schedule" data structure while the match was running. Somebody sent us a match file that consisted of hundreds of zombies spawning every timestep until the match player crashed.

We got it fixed eventually.

Battlecode does not condone underage drinking.

Yes! For 2016's files:

• Download the files here.

• View the game specs here.

• Java API / documentation is here.

• Troubleshooting/help/FAQ forum post is here

It comes with a dummy player "examplefuncsplayer" that basically moves randomly. You can also download source code from last year's participants here.

Edit: added links. We'll also make these accessible on the website at some point.

We run most of our stuff on VMs in Amazon Web Services. It's fairly simple, a few web servers, a server that just compiles code, and a few servers that pull from a match queue and run matches.

We've messed around with tools like Docker and Kubernetes but ultimately VMs serve our needs just fine for now.

Edit: simplistic -> simple