May 3^rd 2006

The full sources of GUN-TACTYX are available for download!

The sources can now be fully recompiled under the Code::Blocks IDE with the Free Borland C++ Command Line Compiler 5.5.1 installed. The users interested in modifying and recompiling the game can now forget the difficult procedures needed by the command line compiler because the entire process is accomplished by a very easy to use IDE.
Both the tools are completely free! To know more about Code::Blocks visit http://www.codeblocks.org/. You should download the version without the default compiler installed, then you must download the Free Borland C++ Command Line Compiler 5.5.1 from Borland at http://www.borland.com/bcppbuilder/freecompiler/.
You can find information on how to get the free Borland compiler and install it from the Code::Blocks site itself, but feel free to ask for help if anything does not work.
The sources are available at the bottom of the Downloads page of the APOCALYX 3D Engine Site.

December 11^th 2005

A renewed interest of some players in the Soccer Mode made me develop a new team devoted to this particular category. It's name is RobyBaggio and togheter with Zidane_2x2, by mig, gives better opportunity to test your own teams against a more effective soccer players than the basic ones. You can find these teams in the repository.
During the development of the team, some problems with the Soccer Mode were found, so you' d better to download GUN-TACTYX-exe-1.1.5 from the Downloads page.
Soccer Mode is very amusing so I hope to see more soccer teams in the repository so it'll be possible to play a soccer tournament too!

November 20^th 2005

Thanks to Iceman, the author of scratter, another tournament was played even this week. The results of scratter are not so good, probably because the competition in the arena is very hard and the weaker teams are not so weak as it seems.
Anyway we have a further occasion to compare the results of the best bots to find another confirm of their relative strongness. The results are compatible with those acquired in the past week tournament; only the weaker teams changed their relative positions because of a different number of victories they achieved. However the number of the matches left for other winners by Krobot, ewm_2_43 and roger is not significative to trust the results of the last positions.
To show some interesting comparison, I played 100 matches 2x8 between Krobot and ewm_2_43. To make the two teams start in opposite positions, I added two null teams in opposite corners. Null teams are real sitting ducks: They do nothing except being shot. After warming their weapons against null teams, the two strongest teams in the arena faced each other moving around the buildings at the center on the plaza and the results are the following: ewm_2_43 wins against Krobot 80-20, so only one fifth of victories is left to Krobot by ewm_2_43. The percentage of survivors is 35.8%-5.38% (largely favourable to ewm_2_43) and the kills are 63.6%-53.2% (more comparable).
I think that Kr0meel, the author of Krobot, has to work very hard to achieve again the GUN-TACTYX Master and cancel the fate: "tragically, a warrior's prime fades quickly".

November 13^th 2005

Another week has passed and emw_2_43 counterstriked the last attack of Krobot. The strongness of ewm_2_43 as a team and the effectiveness of mig as a programmer are now absolutely clear, in fact Krobot is back to the second place, while ewm_2_43 is again the GUN-TACTYX Master.
To speed up the tournament and increase the number of matches played among the same teams in different conditions (4 matches), the challenge was opened to the best 8 teams of the last championship. Now it is more clear also that only the first three, ewm_2_43, Krobot and roger, share the majority of victories, while the others struggle to win the few matches left.
Kr0meel, the author of Krobot, takes a pause of reflection to discover the new weaknesses of ewm_2_43. Let's see if a week is enough for him to find a solution, anyway it seems that even a week can confirm the sentence: "tragically, a warrior's prime fades quickly".

November 6^th 2005

Only a week has passed and Krobot strikes again. ewm_2_43 realized an incredible enterprise: it achieved a gap of at least 15 percentage points from the best teams in the arena, roger and Krobot. Unfortunately for him Kr0meel was waiting since a long time for such an event and immediately he found the appropriate countermeasures, thus now Krobot is the Master again. Instead it seems that Roger needs more time to try an effective counterstrike.
The matches among these three teams show the following results in direct comparison:

• Krobot vs ewm_2_43 47-23
• Krobot vs roger 49-14
• ewm_2_43 vs roger 53-11

October 30^st 2005

After a long wait finally another Master appeared in the arena. Mig uploaded a very powerful team, ewm_2_43, that is now the new landmark in the GUN-TACTYX history. The dominators of the last tournaments, Krobot and before roger, suffered a high percentage loss and that demostrates that ewm_2_43 is of a superior class.
The 39 matches (over 659!) lost by ewm_2_43 are so subdivided: Krobot won 18, roger 13, gunny and jini 3, fraplator and Jackals 1. The total number of matches that every team played against ewm_2_43 is 72.
To speed up the tournament I removed from the arena those teams that didn't reach the 10% of victories in the last challenge, so blam, dabomb, ZeroOne, Lunch and musketeer does not appear in the list. The latter was very near to the limit and probably it was going to achieve a 3% or 4% in this tournament like prueba or jini. Their authors can update the teams to see them fight in the arena again.
Finally someone accepted the difficult challenge to create a new strong team and now the sentence " tragically, a warrior's prime fades quickly" applies to Krobot too. Probably Krobot will try to become the first team again, but in the meantime ewm_2_43 is the new GUN-TACTYX Master!

August 14^th 2005

Thanks to the last team uploaded in the repository, prueba by pablotas, a new tournament took place during the last week. The number of matches was higher than the one of the January challenge but the percentages of the strongest teams are more or less the same, so we can trust that Krobot is really the current GUN-TACTYX Master.
The percentage achieved by prueba is not so bad and it places itself just before the weakest teams: A good result for a first attempt.
Anyway it seems that the motto " tragically, a warrior's prime fades quickly" does not apply to Krobot because no player could write a better behavior until now. No one is going to accept the challenge?

January 16^th 2005

The first tournament of 2005 shows a significative change in the list of results. The team of Kr0meel, Krobot, succeded in replacing Roger at the top of the list. The 88.8% of victories is enough greater than Roger's 83.6% to say that Krobot is the new GUN-TACTYX Master.
The team lost only 32 matches over a total of 286 matches played against Roger's 47. If we analyze the lost matches in detail we discover that the winner of the Krobot's lost matches are: roger 23/24 times, i-bot 3/6, Jackals 2/5, Amoi-TGB 2/7, fraplator 1/5 and gunny 1/6. Instead the matches lost by Roger are: Krobot 42/43 times, Jackals 2/11, gunny 1/8, i-bot 1/9 and fraplator 1/13. So in the direct encounter Krobot wins against roger with a score of 42-23.
Krobot's improvements apart, during this tournament a new team was uploaded too: The Jackals. Its first appearance is very promising and its percentage of 20.6% puts this team among the average teams in the arena. Let's see if the Jackals' future will be brighter.
In conclusion, Krobot is now the Master of the GUN-TACTYX Championship. The life of Roger's team didn't reach its end yet but one must remember that "tragically, a warrior's prime fades quickly". Is Krobot going to keep its position for a long time?
All the possible combination of matches were played but only once.

December 5^th 2004

A month passed since the last tournament because no updates were sent to the teams in the repository. Finally Kr0meel uploaded an improved version of Krobot and the results are very interesting, in fact Krobot reached the results of roger and only 2 victories lacked to a full tie. The tournament lasted for only 715 matches, this means that only a match was played for every combination of 4 teams, so corner draws influence the result. However Kr0meel claims that on the long run Krobot gets better results than roger, so with more luck future tournaments may show a different placing list.
As usual, let's analyze the direct matches between the two strongest teams. Roger lost 31 matches: 25/27 (92.6%) were won by Krobot, 2 by i-bot and 1 by gunny, fraplator, Amoi-TGB and jini. Krobot lost 33 matches: 28/30 (93.3%) were won by roger, 2 by Amoi-TGB, 1 by SimRaz, i-bot and fraplator. Again there is the confirm that the two teams are very close in direct matches. On longer tournaments the differences may appear more clear, but you can try it yourself: The official tournament gives these results.
In conclusion, now I can say that roger and Krobot are the Masters of the GUN-TACTYX Championship, even if roger actually won the tournament. Once again the sentence "tragically, a warrior's prime fades quickly" does not apply to roger and Krobot. Who is going to beat them?
All the possible combination of matches were played but only once. A new team appeared, ZeroOne, but it does not perform very well yet. It is tailored for other types of play and its author is writing a RAD that will be very useful to GT players once released.
See you next week for another tournament of the Gun-TACTYX Master Championship. Will Krobot and roger be close again? Good luck to all the players!

November 22^nd 2004

After a few quiet weeks, a new team was uploaded in the repository: ZeroOne by Amaury. Unfortunately its performances are still very poor so the results of the tournament are similar to the previous ones except that ZeroOne appears in the list before lunch with only 3 victories over 220 matches played. The placing of all the other teams remains unchanged, so I think it's better to wait for ZeroOne or other teams' improvements before publishing new official results.

Amaury claims that ZeroOne is a simple test team written with a GTRAD tool. Does it mean that he developed a RAD to create GUN-TACTYX bots? It would be nice to write SMALL code with an editor specifically thought for GUN-TACTYX! I hope to hear soon more news from Amaury about this subject.

The Gun-TACTYX Master Championship goes on. We still wait for teams better than Krobot or roger. Good luck to all the players!

October 31^st 2004

The results of this tournament show Krobot very near to roger with only a 4.1% of difference. This means that Krobot improved again its algorithms, but it means also that the improvement was not enough yet to threaten roger's supremacy.
Let's analyze the direct matches between the two strongest teams. Roger lost 32 matches: 25/28 (89.3%) were won by Krobot, 6 by i-bot and 1 by gunny. Krobot lost 41 matches: 27/30 (90.0%) were won by roger, 7 by gunny, 4 by i-bot and 1 by musketeer, jini and fraplator. So we discover that now the two teams are very close in direct matches.
To summarize, roger is once more the Absolute Master of the GUN-TACTYX Championship, but Krobot has reached its level of efficiency. The motto "tragically, a warrior's prime fades quickly" does not apply to roger and Krobot... at least not yet.
This time all the possible combination of matches were played but only once. A new team appeared, nir, but it performed worse than dabomb of the same author.
See you next week for another tournament of the Gun-TACTYX Master Championship. Krobot almost regained its supremacy, is roger going to lose its title? Good luck to all the players!

October 24^rd 2004

• This week roger felt below 90% and all thanks to Krobot. Roger is still the Absolute Master with a very high percentage, but the improvements of Krobot show that hard work can bring very satisfactory results. In fact roger has lost 34 matches instead of the 11 of the past tournament: 2 were won by i-bot, 2 by gunny, 1 respectively by fraplator, musketeer and jini, while Krobot won 27 of those matches. There is no doubt that Krobot is still the best opponent for roger!
  To compare better the performances, I must say that Krobot has lost 86 matches (over a total amount of 330). 24 of them were won by other bots, but 62 were won by roger, so the final score is: roger beats Krobots 62 to 27. All these statistics were compiled thanks to the "gtstat" utility by Tobi.
  In conlcusion roger is again the Absolute Master of the GUN-TACTYX Championship, but Krobot is slowly refining its algorithms and tries to regain its lost supremacy. To repeat the usual memento, "tragically, a warrior's prime fades quickly" but roger's youth has not passed yet.
  Again the list of the matches was compiled using the "gtplaylist" utility by Frapl: All the possible combination of matches were played two times to reduce the influence of corners draw. No ties happened, in fact there were roger and Krobot around.
  See you next week for another tournament of the Gun-TACTYX Master Championship. Will Krobot regain its supremacy? Good luck to all the players!

• An interview with Roger, the author of "roger".
  I asked to Roger this interview because I was very curious to know more about the current Master of the Championship. Finally, we discover that from now on will not be so simple to become the new Master... anyway don't miss to try!
  GUN-TACTYX: Now it's your play!

October 17^th 2004

Now I can say that I saw what I thought impossible: A ratio of 319 victories over 330 matches, that is a percentage of 96.7%, and also a percentage of almost 60% of survivors as well as kills. I must thank Roger and his team roger because they brought on my screen so a spectacular tournament: I saw bullets flying towards their targets like fire arrows driven by an invisible hand and I saw also poor warriors running on their wheels towards a certain death unaware of their tragic and ineluctable destiny.
It's a fact that roger lost only 11 matches over 330 and thanks to Tobi's "gtstats" utility I discovered with little effort the teams that succeeded in the exploit. I'm proud to say that gunny won 3 of that matches, while Krobot made better with 4 and i-bot and fraplator worse with 2. I think that for a long time players will be proud if they'll win 1 or 2 times against roger during a tournament of more than 3 hundreds of matches!
Now the time comes for the players to plan more unpredictable paths for their teams because Roger's algorithms are the actual state of the art in enemy tracking techniques. The runs that cross the fire line are no more a winning tactic when roger is in the arena... they are good only for the second place and I'm sure that the appearance of roger will inspire new strategies and begin a new era in GUN-TACTYX challenges. In the meantime roger is the absolute Master of the GUN-TACTYX Championship, but remember that "tragically, a warrior's prime fades quickly" as Krobots, Master for a week, knows well.
The list of the matches was compiled, as usual, using Frapl's "gtplaylist" utility: All the possible combination of matches were played two times to reduce the influence of corners draw. No ties happened this time, in fact there was roger around.
See you next week for another episode of the Gun-TACTYX Master Championship. Will Roger's team beat its own record of 96.7%? Good luck to all the players!

October 10^th 2004

This week another two entries were uploaded in the repository and achieved immediately an incredible result. The teams are Krobot and roger, while the incredible results is that in spite of their very different behaviors they got the first places of the tournament and acquired almost the same high percentage of victories!
So one may ask who is the real winner of this week tournament. In fact the number of victories are the same for both but the ratios are favourable to Krobot because he got also a tie and ties are not taken in account (that's the reason why Krobot's matches are 329 instead of 330). To solve this problem I think we should read the percentages of survivors and kills and those values are favourable to Krobot again, so Krobot is the current GUN-TACTYX Master. However roger is very close so it could be the Master of the next week if it slightly improves its behavior or simply is more lucky.
The good teams i-bot, fraplator, gunny and Amoi-TGB seem very old compared to these young warriors... as Wrokdam knows, "tragically, a warrior's prime fades quickly".
The list of the matches was compiled using the "gtplaylist" utility by Frapl and all the possible combination of matches were played two times to reduce the influence of corners draw. I realized that the matches lost are not a bug in "gtplaylist" or "gun-tactyx" but are simply ties, so two ties occurred during the tournament.
The Gun-TACTYX Master Championship goes on. See you next week and good luck to all the players!

October 3^rd 2004

The new entry of the last week fraplator showed its real value and got a second place. This time the number of matches was enough to obtain more significative percentages and the list of the most successful teams is: i-bot, fraplator, gunny and Amoi-TGB. The list of the matches was compiled using the "gtplaylist" utility by Frapl and all the possible combination were played except one. There is still some luck in the corners draw, but the results are now more reliable than in the past tournaments.
We can see also another new entry by RAZOR, SimRaz, that achieved a good percentage for a cadet.
The Gun-TACTYX Master Championship goes on. Good luck to all the players!

September 26^th 2004

• The new version of GUN-TACTYX, release 1.1.2, is out. Get it from the dowloads page. Now 1.1.2 is the official version that executes the matches of the GUN-TACTYX Master Championship.

• This week we can see a new entry from Frapl, fraplator. The results of this new bot are better than frapevo but it was not developed using Genetic Programming techniques. The evolution of frapevo will take longer: Natural selection needs long times to generate interesting results.
  i-bot, written by tobi, is still the MASTER with 80% of victories, followed by gunny, recruit, Amoi-TGB and fraplator. i-bot apart, again it was only matter of luck to gain a place or the other, so the next tournament will play 1000 matches to achieve more reliable results with 15 teams.
  The Gun-TACTYX Master Championship continues. Good luck to all the players!

September 15^th 2004

An interview with Amoi-TGB, the author of "Amoi-TGB".
I asked to Amoi-TGB this interview and he kindly answered. We discover one more time that it's not difficult to develop a competitive bot yet, so try!
GUN-TACTYX: Now it's your play!

September 12^th 2004

The results of the GUN-TACTYX MASTER Championship were updated. Read them at the Championships page.

i-bot, written by tobi, is still the MASTER with the 85% of victories, followed by gunny, rookie and Amoi-TGB. These 3 teams are very close, so it's matter of luck to gain a place or the other because 333 matches may be too few for a tournament among 14 teams. However there is no doubt that i-bot is the absolute winner in the specific category chosen for the championship.

The GUN-TACTYX Master Championship continues! Visit the Championships page for more details.

September 4^th 2004

The final results of the Summer 2004 GUN-TACTYX Championship are now available. Read them at the Championships page.

Congratulations to i-bot and tobi, its autor, that are the winners of the competition. i-bot won almost 9 matches over 10 played: Really a great result!
Another great results was achieved by Amoi-TGB who got a very good second place just behind i-bot. Amoi-TGB won a little more that 1 match every 2 played, very good result considering that there are 4 competitors for every match in the arena.

Now you can tune your bots for the GUN-TACTYX Master Championship a permament contest among GUN-TACTYX bots. Visit the Championships page for more details.

August 26^th 2004

It's now available an improved version of GUN-TACTYX (1.1).

This version includes two improvements:

• Arguments outside domain of math functions don't block any more the execution of the program.

• Bots cast (simple) shadows. This feature is particularly useful to the user in Soccer mode to follow the movement of the ball. The shadows look a bit odd when the bot is not in direct sun-light because of the format of QuakeIII BSP files, but I'll try to improve the realism of shadows in the next release.

There are also minor bug fixes, but I'm sure that a lot of them are still there, because some functions were not extensively tested yet, so please report any strange behavior or possible bugs you may find. Thank you in advance!

To get the new package visit the downloads page.

July 21^st 2004

The results of the first 250 matches of the current championship are now available. Read them and the related comments at the Championships page.

Finally we got a new entry in the repository: musketeer. It got a good fourth place very close to rookie (31.5% against 34.1%). Let's see if it is going to improve its performances in the future.

Now you can continue to tune your bots for the Summer GUN-TACTYX Championship (July 4^th - September 4^th 2004) aka Where bots dare...

July 4^th 2004

• The final results of the June GUN-TACTYX Championship are now available. Read them and the related comments at the Championships page.
  Gunny and i-bot are again the first and second placed in the Fight category of the championship. Who is going to challenge them?

• An interview with Tobi, the author of i-bot.
  Tobi was very kind to answer a few questions about his experience of play with GUN-TACTYX. The interview is very interesting and we have the opportunity to know a few tricks used by i-bot and to know more about its author. You'll discover also that it's not so difficult to develop a competitive bot yet!
  GUN-TACTYX: Now it's your play!

June 20^th 2004

The June 2004 GUN-TACTYX Championship (June 20^th-27^th- 2004) aka When the game becomes hard... has started.

Visit the Championship page for more information and the detailed rules.

You can get the executable of the game for free from the Downloads page (1.4 Mb). The ZIP contains the version 1.0.0 (final release) and all the materials needed to play documentation included.

Comments, suggestions and constructive criticisms are welcome: You can express them on the Forums related to GUN-TACTYX. Thank you in advance!

GUN-TACTYX: Now it's your play!

May 31^st 2004

The final results of the May GUN-TACTYX Championship are now available. Read them and the related comments at the Championships page.

Congratulations to gunny, i-bot, lunch and blam that are the first and second placed respectively in the two categories of the championship.

Now you can tune your bots for the June GUN-TACTYX Championship (June 20^th-27^th 2004) aka When the game becomes hard...

May 27^th 2004

The results of the first third of matches of the current GUN-TACTYX Championship are now available. Read them and the related comments at the Championships page.
Remember that you have still a few hours, until today's Greenwich midnight, to make changes to your teams for the final two thirds of the matches.

Feel free to open discussions about the results on the forums.

Thank you for playing GUN-TACTYX!

May 23^rd 2004

Finally the official site of GUN-TACTYX works again. I'm really sorry for the inconvenience, but I have no fault. Anyway, the Championship can start with the following changes to the rules:

1. To meet the requirements of potential players damaged by the recent problems of the server, I'll accept new uploads until tomorrow, May 24^th, at Greenwich midnight. Even upgrades of bots will be accepted, so you can already start to find contermeasures tailored for the current opponents.

2. On May 27^th (one day after the scheduled date), I'll publish the results of the first 333 matches for each category. Before (the Greenwich) midnight of the same day, players can provide a further improved version of their bots for the last 667 matches.

3. On May 30^th (again one day after the scheduled date), I'll publish the final results.

Feel free to open discussions about the new rules and the uploaded bots on the forums. Visit the Repository to download the uploaded bots.

Thank you for playing GUN-TACTYX!

May 18^th 2004

Finally published the RULES of the First GUN-TACTYX Championship! (May 22^nd-29^th 2004)
Read the Championship page for more details.

GUN-TACTYX: Now it's your play!

May 1^st 2004

The final release of GUN-TACTYX is now available! Download it and try to win the first GUN-TACTYX Championship

Finally, the first GUN-TACTYX Championship is announced officially:

1. Players must take an Account and Upload their team of warriors to the Repository between May 1st to May 22nd 2004 (at Greenwich midnight)
2. All the teams of warriors submitted will be collected and a week of matches will take place
3. The absolute winner will be announced on May 30th

Visit the Championship page for more information and the detailed rules.

You can get the executable of the game for free from the Downloads page (1.4 Mb). The ZIP contains the version 1.0.0 (final release) and all the materials needed to play including the documentation.

Comments, suggestions and constructive criticisms are welcome: You can express them on the Forums related to GUN-TACTYX. Thank you in advance!

Be the first winner of the GUN-TACTYX Championship: It's simpler at the beginning!

GUN-TACTYX: Now it's your play!

March 28^th 2004

The Release Candidate 3 of GUN-TACTYX is finally available. It includes two new modes of play: Soccer and Race. In the package of the game that you can download from the downloads page, a sample level, known as field, for Soccer matches (in the GUN-TACTYX sense) and sample scripts implementing simple tactics are already included.
The Info page was updated to provide a brief information about these new modes, but you can send any question to me at the email address tetractys@users.sf.net

March 20^th 2004

Finally, even the info page is translated in italian. Click here

March 8^th 2004

The RC3 (Release Candidate 3) version of GUN-TACTYX is under development. Next to come: GUN_TACTYX Soccer. Stay tuned!

March 6^th 2004

The italian version of the site is now on-line. Click here

March 1^st 2004

The official site of the GUN-TACTYX Programming Game is now active thanks to Game Programming Italia. Here you can find info and useful links to get started with this interesting game.

This site includes a repository where players can upload their warriors to challenge other players and a champioships section where the result of future contests will be published.