DescentBB

Anyone else tried this game? It's SWEET! Basically you have a little robot on a 2D playing field that goes around shooting at other little robots. The hitch? You can't control your robot directly. You have to program the robot to avoid fire, return fire of its own, not smash into walls, etc etc etc. Some robots can approach 3,000 lines of code! (and no, I don't have anything like this number on anything of mine yet. ) Robots are programmed in Java, and can start out with as few as 10-20 lines of code for a decent robot.

Here's a linky to help those interested in installing it... http://robocode.alphaworks.ibm.com/home/home.html

my brother had a very similar game to this a long, long time ago (like, mid-80's in windows 3.1) and it looked like a ton of fun. He was always tweaking his little scripts. I was too young to have any clue how to program, so I never played.

I do remember asking him why he only had 10 lines of code on one of his robots, and he said he didn't have enough points to upgrade it to hold more code. Do you know if this game has similar upgrades?

No, in this game you can add however much code you want. You can keep tweaking your code ad infinitum, and there are ALWAYS ways to improve it (some robots I've extracted had 3,000 lines of code in their MAIN CLASS ONLY. That's without including all of the alternate behaviors that these robots can learn and use if they get beat.) My robot is approaching 150 lines of code in length, and I've seen it beat bots with twice that code. It really depends on how good you are. If you're capable of programming advanced AI, or want to learn how to program AI, this is the game for you.

The Microsoft .Net "Terrarium" project is another thing like this. We did it in a CS as a project and it was quite fun.

This might be quite fun actually.