Re: robowiki are down now

Hey guys - late to the dialogue, but a few things to mention. (Beware: wall of text incoming.)

The wiki mostly runs itself and is hosted at VPSLink, which is pretty reliable. The problem during downtime is that neither myself, who "owns" the wiki (i.e., from PEZ), nor David Alves, who actually pays for hosting, actually care so much about Robocode anymore. When your heart's not in it, there are plenty of other things that take precedence.

I believe MediaWiki has a facility to export all the pages to an XML format. We could make the full archive available somewhere (eg, someone's Dropbox) every so often, if it's something people are interested in. Then you can do whatever you want with it. It strikes me as the kind of thing people say they want, then nobody would actually download it. :-) But we could try.

There's certainly nobody acting as a gatekeeper here to keep it single sourced. There are no ads. PEZ and I gave a dump of the old wiki to someone upon request a while back. The RoboWiki is all about sharing Robocode knowledge.

There are plenty of other programming games, but nothing in the same league as Robocode as far as number of bots or active competitions. Then again, people also complain that there is nothing new to be innovated in Robocode, so it's a double-edged sword. I like to joke that it's the "Google Reader of programming games" – it got a huge corporate push from IBM, it smothers the rest of the market (tons of bots, history, Java, name recognition), and might need to die off before all these other games can blossom - hopefully with some kind of common community, as well as communities of their own.

I have my own offering: BerryBots (http://berrybots.com). You can read a comparison to Robocode gameplay here: http://berrybots.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17 ... Or even try it in a browser: http://playberrybots.com. Primarily, it features programmable stages, walls on the playing field, and a secondary weapon (grenade-like). It also has a pretty sweet automation API with built-in multithreading, (optional) graphical form inputs, and the ability to save HTML5 replays of matches. There are only a few bots, but I'd be hella impressed if you can beat Sanic (from Frohman).

The other games that have caught my eye are FightCodeGame.com, a fully web based Robocode-inspired game; and NodeWar.com, which might be the only truly inspiring / innovative gameplay I've seen. I'd also check out http://programminggames.org, which seems to be gaining steam.

I sympathize with the desire to join a large, active community. But the RoboWiki might make the Robocode community seem a lot more active than it is. Good luck catching me and Skilgannon while we never update our bots. ;) At some point, we have to make something new. I suspect even "Robocode 2" will have the same problems as the rest of the new entrants into the genre.

Hope that's enlightening! Best of luck,

-- Patrick

Sent from mobile

> On May 4, 2015, at 4:32 PM, Jesse Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I'll raise my hand.  I just don't know what would need to be done though since I've never done this before.  Would a service such as http://www.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page suffice?  Can anyone provide some other guidance on a good way to host that is minimal cost?  Also, how would one obtain the current wiki content?
> 
> Question.  Is robocode still viable or are there other better, widely used, supported platforms along the same vein?  Please advise.  I'm looking to work with a platform like robocode to ultimately compete against others..
> 
> 
>> On Sun, May 3, 2015 at 5:57 PM, ramn.se ‘¸ <[email protected]> wrote:
>> How do we get hold of the database?
>> 
>>> On Sun, May 3, 2015 at 8:31 PM, Pavel Šavara <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> Hi everybody, 
>>> 
>>> it would be perhaps good idea if all people who think robowiki is important would try to help.
>>> Somebody may try to run mirror, or perhaps somebody would organize and run it on more stable hosting ?
>>> Perhaps people would donate some cash needed to pay for the hosting ?
>>> Just suggestions, in the end it's community project, right ?
>>> 
>>> Anybody at all ? Raise your hands !
>>> 
>>> Pavel
>>> 
>>>> On Sun, May 3, 2015 at 11:48 AM, <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> Yeah, I hope they fix it soon... It's really important for many people!
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