Roboforge

BRIEF HISTORY RoboForge is a video game released in 2001 by Liquid Edge, a small company mainly created to develop and sell this game. The company's founder, Darren Green, was inspired by the well known Robot Wars (TV series). He noticed that Robot Wars was an interesting game, but the cost of a real bot and the know-how required restricted drastically its spread, so he decided to virtualize Robot Wars concepts into a new PC game, calling it RoboForge. RoboForge introduced an innovative concept: build your own robot (also called "bot" or "bots") on a limited virtual cost budget, then enter it into an arena with one other robot and run a full 3D robot battle until a robot's CPU or chassis is destroyed or time is called. Liquid Edge announced the game in July, 2000 and then released the first version on May 23, 2001. From 2001 to 2003 Liquid Edge ran RoboForge tournaments: amateur tournaments with no entry-fee and no prizes; and pro tournaments with a 5.00 USD entry-fee and prizes. Unfortunately, the cost of running the server plus the pro tournament prizes had a negative net income to RF. Liquid Edge was paying out more money than they were taking in for entry fees. They were only getting money from people buying the game which just was not enough to generate a profit from it. Last "pay to enter" tournament was run in 2003. After a few years of silence, in September 2006, the directors and shareholders of Liquid Edge released the source code and server into the hands of the Roboforge community. From July 2008 RoboForge became a registered Open Source project and it is now possible to download the game, build bots and enter them into amateur tournaments for free. GAME DESCRIPTION Categorically RoboForge is a mix of strategy game/educational game/simulation game. The game can be split into the following steps: - The construction of a 3D virtual robot using a library of predefined components. The components to be connected together are: chassis, controller, engine, sensors, mobile joints, shields and weapons. - The definition of movements: this is very easy just take an initial and final snapshot of the parts to be moved. - AI definition: RoboForge's programming language is not supported by any particular language (you don't need to be a programmer) but simple functional blocks are available to describe how the robot should move towards the enemy, when to activate weapons, rotate sensors, etc. Ai is the only way to control your bot: there is no way to control it through the keyboard or joypad. Therefore you have to make your bot intelligent enough to look for the enemy, attack it, or run away (if necessary). - Test your bot vs some demo/test bots directly available in the game. - Enter your bot into a tournament. Tournaments are NOT pay-to-enter, so robots can be entered into any tournament free of charge. The tournaments run offline, so you can build/modify your robots when you have the time and then just enter them into the next tournament. Your presence is not required during the tournament. - View the resulting tournament battle replays (3d graphic). There are "ranked" and "un-ranked" tournaments with different weight (or rather, credit-limit) categories. Results from ranked tournaments are recorded on a 57 day, rolling total leaderboard. You can also challenge someone else's bots online in a challenge room. Once again there is no human intervention: one person hosts the battle and when it's done both players can view the replay.