[Realtimebattle-discussion] Possible improvement on RTB

[Discussions c. R. <rea...@li...>]

Hi you robots,

I've got a proposal on improving RTB. At the beginning of each round the 
server sends an initialize message (the only message whose name is in 
american english whereas colour is british english) and then pauses for 
2 seconds. Thereafter it tells you that the game starts, gives you the 
number of participating robots and all the game options. On the one hand 
this implies that you don't know the physical parameters of the 
environment during initialising the robot in the first 2 seconds. And on 
the other hand this means that you have to do a lot of slow input and 
parsing in the first one or two ticks.

Wouldn't it be smarter to send the game options straight after telling 
respectively receiving the clients name? Then one could use the physical 
parameters to do some physical calculation during the initialising and 
this also decreases the robots work during the first ticks which 
increases its responsiveness. (My robot doesn't recognise the 50 ms 
pause between the first two or three blocks consisting of a radar, 
coordinates, info, and energy message because there is too much input on 
stdin.)

Just as a further funny thing: I've also started programming a robot for 
RTB last week. But I'am using Haskell and the concept functional 
reactive programming.

Regards,
   Martin.