LeekWars has been around for a while now. I remember having a blast playing it with colleagues at least 10 years ago.
From memory, as you level you get access to more and more API features. A good way to have a stronger leek was to manage to implement algorithms before they were officialy available to you through the API. Ex: instead of waiting to level up to get access to A* pathfinding, you could get a huge advantage against other leeks by implementing it yourself within the memory and cycle constraints you were given for your AI code.
Happy to see it's still apparently going strong...
Hello, I'm the developer of Leek Wars, thank you for sharing my link!
I'm from France and I've been coding this game with my friends since 2012 when I was in University. I try to add features and improve the language from time to time.
We are improving the English documentation/help and translating more pages :) The OOP in LeekScript is very close to JS.
At the moment there is no official way to sync your code, but LW has a REST API you can use to interact with the game programmatically. I would love to implement a proper synchronization with a Git repo in the future!
This reminded me of another fun programming game called Elevator Saga (https://play.elevatorsaga.com). Essentially, you need to write the code for a system of elevators to transport the maximum number of people in a given time.
It's a problem I've thought about every so often, but never bothered to look up how it was commonly implemented. For example, If you have a large building with multiple elevators, is there an optimal way to arrange the elevators while they're idle to minimize transport time? Or what about accounting for time of day? (e.g. stacking the elevators on the bottom floor in the morning as people arrive at the office). Or what advantages do you gain mathematically from having Up/Down buttons vs. the touchpads where people select the exact floor? Seems like an interesting problem if you work on elevators installed in tall office buildings.
For those who are too young or forgot this hearkens back to RobotWar by Silas Warner on the Plato system in 1970s and later on the Apple II (1981) and there may well have been something from an earlier time on the old big iron. Does anyone know of anything earlier? I had so much fun on RobotWar and it had an impeccable source level debugger which was a revelation in 1981. I'm excited there are current code battle arena games.
You might be interested in bot programming section of https://www.codingame.com/multiplayer/bot-programming . The programming interface is standard input output based so they support a lot of programming languages including Rust.
They also occasionally organize live tournaments lasting for a week or two, which introduce a new game. From the names like fall-challange-2021 and spring-challange-2021 I assume those happen no more than every 6 months.
In general the ones that are in form of temporary contests often support many languages due to same reason I mentioned before. One thing to watch out that due to sandboxing reasons and the platform needing to compile your code any third party libraries are usually not available. This might be slightly more painful for Rust and their crate based ecosystem.
Reminds me of Terrarium, which Microsoft introduced with .net, to demonstrate you can safely run sandboxed assemblies in a single process: http://terrariumapp.github.io/
Aw man, I made some truly OP bots for bot land. And a set up a custom TypeScript to BotLandScript compiler for them: https://github.com/mizzao/bot.land
So many improvements in that repo, that I didn't get to finish
Seems like a lot of new players don't know they start with upgrade points. I'm winning most fights with default code because I have 100 more health than the other lvl 1s.
If anyone is having trouble finding the documentation, the original link given from the intro page is broken but the "help" button will take you to the right place:
https://leekwars.com/help/documentation.
If you're referring to the pictures sliding off the edge of the central div, I think that's intentional.
The website seems to work fine in GNOME Web (tested on Epiphany 3.36.4 and Epiphany 42.2, which both use WebKit 605.1.15). I guess it must be a Safari only problem? Consider reporting your problems to Apple if the website doesn't work right on their browser, as the open source version of the underlying engine renders it fine.
Normally I would agree but games are notoriously hard to get working in Safari (not to mention iOS Safari). It's basically a dead race and I never presume a game will work.
On Safari (again on my computer), the first few pages of content are constrained to about a small area in the centre of the screen. It looks fine on Firefox.
This is amazing. I don't have the time to get into something like this these days, but I would've loved something like this in my teens. Instead I wrote bots for RuneScape lol.
I've played this game when I was 10, ans it was tons of fun and a good way of putting programming to practice. I definitely recommend it for any beginners, unless the skill level exploded somehow.
It's a custom interpreted scripting language. As long as the interpreter doesn't have any hooks for disk or network I/O, pointer manipulation, etc., it's pretty safe. You could go further by sandboxing in a VM or suchlike if you're concerned about incidental arbitrary-code exploits, but in reality it's not any more dangerous than running any other game server.
I don't know how it is done here but there are plenty of ways: VMs, sandboxes, etc...
There is no problem running untrusted code as long as the I/O and interrupts are protected, something that is a standard feature of all the CPUs and OSes that the server may run on... Unless you find a bug to exploit.
From memory, as you level you get access to more and more API features. A good way to have a stronger leek was to manage to implement algorithms before they were officialy available to you through the API. Ex: instead of waiting to level up to get access to A* pathfinding, you could get a huge advantage against other leeks by implementing it yourself within the memory and cycle constraints you were given for your AI code.
Happy to see it's still apparently going strong...