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170

answers:

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Many years ago, just as I was getting started with programming, I ran into some programming games in the style of CRobots (I don't think it actually was CRobots, but a clone of sorts) which were pretty cool to play around with.

Recently I've gotten a feeling of "programming is work, not play", which I would rather get rid of, so I figured what would be better than to challenge my colleagues to a competition of who can make the best robot.

However, with many different levels of experience, and many different preferences with regards to programming language, I would rather not tie the competition to a single language. The ones I found after a late night of googling seem to be tied to a single language, and even the ones that are based on Java (like Robocode) seem to have problems trying to use Jython or other JVM-based languages (that in theory should work).

Are there any games of this type out there that is not restricted to a single language?

+1  A: 

After more digging, I have found two projects that seems to be fairly mature: IWOR and RealTimeBattle, which both are based on simple messaging systems for the robots to communicate with a server that controls the battle.

This means you can implement a robot in any language you want, as long as it can support sockets (for IWOR) or stdin/stdout (for RTB).

Epcylon
I was a bit hasty. RTB seems to be so matured it's dead (and wont compile), while IWOR isn't quite the type of game I was looking for (there's no shooting at other robots for instance ;).
Epcylon
A: 

Robocode will become .NET enabled soon. And there is good potential for other languages for JVM.

Pavel Savara