CROBOTS is a programming game, for programmers or aspiring programmers (1985) | Hacker News Reader

CROBOTS is a programming game, for programmers or aspiring programmers (1985)

tpoindex.github.io

76 pointstpoindex9 comments

Mr. Poindexter, I'd like to sincerely thank you for creating CROBOTS, and for open sourcing it. I spent many hours as a child fondly learning from the examples (I especially remember sniper.r as being educational in grade school) and hacking away at my own bots. I was already interested in C at the time, after studying BASIC, but CROBOTS helped me understand C and statistics in a practical way (the tangible results of many test samples resulting in robotic destruction or victory!), and served as motivation to continue down the software development path.

You're welcome! It is always gratifying for me when I hear stories similar to yours. I've even heard a few similar stories in person from colleagues in my professional career.

Open sourcing CROBOTS was something I should have done a long time ago. I always thought I'd get back to it, but life, kids, job, & other projects seemed to always come first. Thanks to Neil Fraser for finally prompting me to put it up on Github under an open source license. Neil also converted the manual to HTML.

If you like this kind of thing, you might take a look at Robot Odyssey[1], from around the same time. You solve puzzles by wiring up digital circuits inside of your 3 robots. Playing it in elementary school is what got me interested in electronics; it's an amazing game.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey

Is there a name for this kind of game? I really enjoy programming games but have no idea how to search for them ("programming games" is not very useful for this purpose). I've implemented a couple, but have no idea if there's a community I can show them to and get feedback or other competitors.

You might find the following link interesting: http://programminggames.org/

I have had a lot of fun playing with the original or modern clones of corewars and robotwars.

This is a modern take on the idea http://robocode.sourceforge.net/ I've spent a considerable amount of rainy evenings with it, and I don't regret it at all!

It still pains me that clicking on sourceforge links legitimately triggers uBlock warnings. :(

This reminded me of a game I had read about, and looking it up, the game was RobotWar, which is mentioned as an inspiration for CROBOTS.

There's an interesting article in an old issue of Computer Gaming World [1] which discusses RobotWar and includes a BASIC listing for a tournament-winning robot, pretty cool.

[1] http://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/cgw_2.2.pdf (page 25)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colobot

A java programming game in 3D - good fun :)

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