Launching your first game

Prerequisites

Some programs and libraries must be installed before launching your first game.

You should also decide in which language your bot will be implemented. Some netorcai client libraries have been implemented in several languages to help you build your bot. If you do want to implement your bot in an unsupported language, please refer to netorcai’s metaprotocol documentation to implement your own library.

Running the game server

The netorcai program is in charge of this. This program must be started first, as all the other ones connect to it. If it is installed correctly, just run netorcai to run it. Some of the game parameters can be tuned by netorcai’s command-line interface, please refer to netorcai --help to list the tunable parameters.

Running the game logic

The hexabomb program is in charge of this. It can be executed with hexabomb MAP, where MAP is a map filename. Map files are available in hexabomb’s git repository. Please refer to hexabomb --help for a list of hexabomb command-line options.

Running the visualization

The hexabomb-visu program does this. It can simply be executed with hexabomb-visu. Once again, more options are available (see hexabomb-visu --help).

Running example bots

How to run the bot highly depends on the selected language. Example bots and instructions on how to run them can be found in the bots directory of hexabomb’s git repository.

Note

You are completely free to hack these example bots as a starting point to implement your own bot, as they are unlicensed.

Starting the game

The netorcai program has an interactive prompt. You can type help in it to list available commands. The start command should run the game.

Note

If you want the game to start automatically once all expected clients are connected, you may be interested in netorcai’s --autostart option.