Assignment 2: Deathmatch Bots

This assignment will be due April 23rd with a one day grace period until the 24th. After the grace period not assignments will be accepted. EXTENSION: Due to problems with students obtaining the message parsing Java files, there is an extension to April 27th with a grace deadline until the 28th.

Goals

The goals of the assignment are the following:

1. To give your bot goals and behavior.
2. To gain experience with a general structure such as a productions system, finite state machine, or blackboard system as well as the benefits/drawbacks of that structure within the realm of games.
3. To implement a bot for playing a DeathMatch game.
4. To have fun with a little bot competition in the lab.

The Assignment

You can start with the simple bot from lab. Your bot must be able to play the DeathMatch game (try to kill others and not be killed yourself) on the DM-stalwart map. Note that the map has several boxes that can be shot for special items and jump points.

Caveats to this are:

• You should be able to turn off shooting manually on your bot for testing purposes. The servers will be unreal and deepsearch.
• You may use whatever means necessary to keep yourself alive and healthy.
• You are not allowed to communicate with any of the other bots or gang up. You may taunt or hunt specific bots.
• You must write a text file to submit that discusses the following:
  • Discuss the type of structure you used in the programming of your AI bot. Describe the drawbacks and benefits of structuring the AI in this manner.
  • Discuss specifics about how your bot is constructed. As an example, describe all your states for a finite state machine bot.
  • Describe how to compile your code and run your bot.
  • Discuss and problems you or your code have for the assignment.

Submission

Try is up. You will use try to submit your source code for this project. There are a 2 submissions for try:

1. Your code: try jdb-grd hmwk2-1 bot.tar
2. A file containing your answers to the questions. This file may be in MS Word, text, pdf, or html : try jdb-grd hmwk2-2 description.*

10 points will be dedicated to your creativity and the entertainment value of how you programmed your agent. You should use diagrams in your description document. Note that 50% of your grade will be based on your answers to the questions.