tanks/docs/running.md

title
Running Tanks

Unfortunately, it's kind of a mess right now. I know there are a few forks of this code, and I would love it if someone proposed a merge to clearly illustrate how to run tanks.

When I spin up a new tanks game, typically I run something like:

while sleep 60; do ./run-tanks */; done

This assumes all your tanks directories are in the same place as run-tanks.

Included programs

I tried to stick with the Unix philosophy of one program per task. I also tried to avoid doing any string processing in C. The result is a hodgepodge of C, Bourne shell, and awk, but at least each piece is fairly simple to audit.

run-tanks tank1 tank2 ...

Runs a single round, awards points with rank.awk, and creates a new summary.html with summary.awk. This is the main interface that you want to run from cron or whatever.

forftanks tank1 tank2 ...

A program to run a round of tanks and output a JSON description of the game. This is what tanks.js uses to render a game graphically. The object printed contains:

[[game-width, game-height],
 [[tank1-color, 
  [[sensor1range, sensor1angle, sensor1width, sensor1turret],
   ...]],
  ...],
 [[
  [tank1x, tank1y, tank1angle, tank1sensangle, 
   tank1flags, tank1sensors],
  ...],
 ...]]

If file descriptor 3 is open for writes, it also outputs the results of the round to fd3.

rank.awk

Processes the fd3 output of forftanks to award points and output an HTML results table.

summary.awk tank1 tank2

Creates summary.html, linking to all rounds and showing overall standing.

designer.cgi

Accepts form input and writes a tank.