PodballIntro

Introduction

Podball is a futuristic ball game simulation and programming contest.

Podball OpenGL match viewer

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Intro Video: https://youtu.be/wkvp-qvX68E

Two teams compete against each other in a rectangular arena, trying to kick a ball into the other teams goal to score points. Much like soccer or ice hockey. Each player of a team is called a pod, hence the name of the project. The pods and ball are circular objects that can move in any direction on the plane but are subject to inertia and friction.

But what is more important than the game itself is the way the teams are controlled: Teams are controlled by program modules that are up to you to conceive and develop! That is the programming contest part of Podball.

This is comparable to the Soccer Simulation League variant of ​Robocup, except that the Podball physics and interface are much much simpler and easier to master.

Podball specifies a simple interface to which client code can connect to control the behavior of a team of pods on the field.

Currently, and for historic reasons, only a Windows DLL interface is available and fully specified. But it is planned to extend the interface to scripting languages like Lua, Javascript or Python, in order to allow control of a Podball team from within those environments too.

History of the Project

The first discussion about a ball game based artificial intelligence contest date back to the year 2001, where a guy named Der Sensemann posted an according idea on the German BuHa discussion board: ​http://www.buha.info/board/showthread.php?t=13959 . I (Scrontch) joined the project after having read a post on the German ​C++ Forum. I coined the name Podball and also designed the logos and first web page.

With Sensemann and me as a core team, we coded the first version of the game. I developed the core physics engine (C++), while Sensemann concentrated on the main GUI application (written in Delphi) that should load the engine and the different plug-in modules. It was a particularity of the project that we developed both parts completely independently (public hosted source code versioning systems were not widespread at that time).

Later, another guy named Noil joined in and coded the match viewer module. He also provided the web space for our first public appearance. Unfortunately, Noil later disappeared without leaving any traces or contacts. The contest had had some contributions from other module coders, but it never gained the momentum we had hoped for. So the project silently died out at the end of 2001.

In 2010, nearly 10 years later, I (Scrontch) was trying to revive the project. I have re-used most parts of the well proven game engine and completely rewritten the loader and viewer parts. Also, the API has been completely reworked, in order to simplify it significantly.