A PGD Challenge without Scoring and Judges?

[SilverWarior]

I'm not familiar with Colobot, but judging by the few screenshots I saw, it looks much more advanced than what would be needed for this challenge.

Yes Colobot does have some decent looks but the main reason for this is to make it atractive for other pepole to actually use it. From waht I know Colobot was made by a higschool proffesor as a way to atract students into C++ programing. And it can be actually used even by the pepole who never had any prior programming experience. While in most cases you don't need to do any complicated AI in colobot (just MoveTo, Grab, Drop, TurnLeft, TurnRight, Shoot are enough to end most missions), but if you want you can write a preety damn compilcated AI (several bots working in groups).

There even was a bot game that used Pascal Script a few years back.

Can you please remember the name of that game. I have been searching many times to find any such game which would use Pascal language for AI development and I had no luck finding any.

The biggest challenge for making the game would properly be to create an interface to allow entries made in various Pascal dialects. I would say that at least Delphi, FPC and Oxygene must be supported. One solution would be to use a client/server paradigm and use sockets for communication.

Simplest way to handle AI bots i have seen, is to use use writeln(), readln(). Host application starts all bots, and writes/reads to each, using those simple console commands. First communication could be from host, who could assign turn number for each bot. Bots writeln() their moves and wait for enemy moves with readln(). Host writeln()'s other bots where he moved, and so on. Point being, you don't need TCP or anything complicated.

I don't think ReadLn and WriteLn would be the best choice for this. Yes they can be quickly implemented but they do pose some limitation (the amount od data it can be transmited using this approach). Lets say that you try to develop some more advanced AI that can contoll several units as a group (to cooperate). For doing this nicely you need to be able to retrive the current status for all of theese units (get information about their surroundings) at once and then send varios commands to all of theese units.

If you ask me I think it would be best to use Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs). From what I know all of Pascal Development tools are capable of compiling Dynamic Link Librarry.
But for this to work the game itself should alow the DLL to retrieve needed information so that decisions can be processed and then returned back using some standardiesd procedure. And if you allow theese DLLs to actually be able to store some presistant data you can even write yourself procedures whoch would alow you to actually compile yourself a map so that you can coordinate your units better.