Well this entry is being posted a little later than anticipated, sorry to anyone out there who may or may not have been interested.
 
On Wednesday 29th March, Andy and I, working with Darren McKie, organised and held another Unreal Tournament coding competition. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, check out my previous blog entries.
This time round Darren came up with the brilliant idea of a challenge based competition. The challenge, to defeat his custom made ‘house-bot’.
Ripper, the bot, was left running on the competition server for a couple of weeks prior to the event and competitors were able to put their own bots in to the arena to practice for the big day. Darren was confident that his bot was good enough to fend off the others; so much so that he invited a ‘three of their bots versus one of his’ format. Would Ripper be as good as he claimed? Could the students create three bots that could work together and take him down? Only time would tell.

So, we set up, made sure people could connect to the server properly from the lab and away we went. There were less students taking part this time round, but that was only due to the imminent coursework deadlines that were looming over all those who hadn’t yet finished. Despite this the event went very smoothly, everyone worked well with Visual Studio C# Express, and some pretty good bots were thrown into the arena.

After much fun and games it became apparent that Darren had developed the superior bot. Ripper was lethal in combat, predicting the movements of its opponents and making sure that there was a minimal chance of being hit by enemy fire. The entrants had a good shot at it but in the end Ripper was just too good.
With the competition over and prizes dished out we had unfortunately reached the end of our final MSP coding competition. Next year, with any luck and a bit of help, someone will take on the UT Bots and use it just as we did, to make coding fun.
Who knows maybe next year someone will actually manage to beat Ripper :)