Just for fun, I've duplicated a programmer's competition which was part of the 2009 ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) Challenge: Capture



There are no mice, joy-sticks, or keystrokes involved; the two opposing players are entirely controlled by opposing programs which send control commands to their moving "sleds" and "bumpers" via the game engine.

The game engine in turns supplies to each player the entire game state - sleds, bumpers, and the 112 movable pucks.

I think it is ready for interested (or bored) programmers to have a go at creating a King of the Amiga Hill player program.

The engine does the [2D] physics and graphics, so programming your own player is not beyond a beginning or a rusty programmer, but programming a really good player is a challenge for the best programmer.

The players and the engine are separate processes, communicating via Amiga pipes, so it is open to anyone's favorite Amiga language, C, E, Modula-2, maybe even Python.

Since I used my Aglet Modula-2 compiler to do the engine and also am supplying sources for some simple example players in Modula-2, I'm hoping to spark some interest in my favorite language.

I've also included however, as proof of concept, a working C source version of "RandomPlayer" (working in spite of my doubtful C).

My simple examples run pretty much as they should. All testing has been done on an A1 and a Sam-Flex 440, both with Radeon 9250.

The download is at capturecontest.lha
Or you can download more details at CaptureContest.guide

Tom