We've been at it again here in Hull, on the 8th of February myself, Andy Sterland and James Lissiak held a competition in the games lab. This time entrants had to develop a Bot for the game Unreal Tournament using C# and Visual Studio Express. The day was a great success with loads of students and staff turning up to take part in and watch the fun.
There was pizza, drinks and prizes available for all and the day went relatively smoothly. There was however a tense half hour during which myself and Andy started to worry that things were going wrong; bots were being disconnected from the server for no apparant reason. Despite alot of stress testing over the week previous we had never seen this behaviour and had no explanation for it other than a change in the infrastructure of the network that we didn't know about. Just as we were going to move to our fallback plan the uni staff (Rob Miles, Darren McKie) came up with the answer, order was restored soon after. It turned out that the VirtualPC image we were using was setup with a RealTek adapter for its networking, this was resulting in replicated MAC and IP addresses and a rapid kick from the server for those clashing. A quick change of settings to shared(NAT) soon had the server populated with battle hungry Bots. It just goes to show that no matter how prepared you think you are, there's always something that can pop up and mess with your mind.
Two hours, and a million questions later the final rounds of the competition began. There were too many entrants for the server to handle them and so the first stage of the competition consisted of two ten minute rounds of 'Deathmatch' one with one half of the entrants and the other with the other half. The top four Bots from each of these rounds then went on into the final round.
The Final turned out to be a tense and extremely close match. with only one point between first, second and third place (18,17,16) check out http://www.hullmsp.org.uk/Events/UTBots.aspx for a list of the winners and a few photos.
The overall winner walked away with a Game Boy Micro and a King Kong game. If only I could have entered....
As the event ended and people + prizes started to leave the room we got some feedback on the event. Everyone said that they had enjoyed it and would come along to another, infact we've received several requests for various other events including some UTBot rematches. Time and workload allowing we're going to have to see what we can do.
Maybe if there's some rematches Andy, James and I will see how our test bots do against the number one :D