RoboWar

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RoboWar is an open source game in which you program robots to battle each other. The syntax of the language in which the robots are programmed is a relatively simple stack-based one, based largely on IF, THEN, and simply-defined variables.

25 RoboWar tournaments were held in the past between 1989 until roughly 2003, when tournaments became intermittent and many of the major coders moved on. All robots from all tournaments are available on the RoboWar website. While RoboWar was originally released as a closed source freeware game for the Apple Macintosh platform, the source code has since been released and implementations are now also available for Microsoft Windows.

The RoboWar programming language, RoboTalk, is based on Reverse Polish Notation and is similar in structure to FORTH.

[edit] Programming Features

RoboWar for the Macintosh was notable among the genre of autonomous robot programming games for the powerful programming model it exposed to the gamer. By the early 1990s, RoboWar included an integrated debugger that permitted stepping through code and setting breakpoints. Later editions of the RoboTalk language used by the robots (a cognate of the HyperTalk language for Apple's HyperCard) included support for interrupts as well.