• 3 people per team
• 2 computers per team
• C++ AI programming
• Contest details and API released Friday night at the mandatory Kick-off Session
• Coding begins Saturday for 24 hours with a mandatory 5 hours spent out of the lab
• Competition is Sunday afternoon. If you need to leave early, you can still compete but be sure to let us know!
• Lots of food and soda provided by us to keep you going. But NO eating in the labs.

Prizes awarded for 1st, 2nd, & 3rd places including Apple iPods to the members of the winnng team!

You will write all C++ classes and game engine code will be provided — your team must code the AI that controls your mechs during the game. One or two complete sample clients will be provided.

Using the API and framework we provide, you will implement a Team class that controls the behavior of a "team" of "mechs" competing with another "team" in a virtual arena. The API will provide methods for examining the game environment and the opposing "team" and sending commands to your "team". This year, the "mechs" are ships, and the contest will be open battle on the high seas. Combat will take places in a variety of ship types, including submarines and aircraft carriers. Further details will be released at the kickoff on Friday.

Some AI constructs will be provided, since this is going to be a more complicated contest. Specifically, basic pathfinding will be provided. You will be given the source to a working AI to base your efforts on, although more ambitious teams are free to start from scratch. Needless to say, the workload on the players won't be significantly more than last year. The other rules remain the same: no outside code can be brought in (on electronic media). You are allowed to bring published books and other printed materials for reference. (We have seen people bring in whole stacks of books, but they didn't get much benefit from them.) As a clarification, you are allowed to bring in non-code files via electronic media (or over the network.) Examples include rc files, build scripts, notes, and basically anything else that doesn't contain actual code. There's obviously some room for interpretation here, but if in doubt use this rule of thumb: Don't do anything would entitle you to the big fuzzy bat to your head.

The MechMania staff will not tolerate cheating of any kind and we will sic our Mechsbig fuzzy bats on those dubbed cheaters. Actually last year some people tried to cheat and failed miserably! So ha!

A final note: this year's competition is being released under the GPL. As such, derived works (that means the code you will be writing) need to adhere to a GPL-compatible licence. This will allow us to (among other things) release all the competitor's AIs along with the competition framework after the conference. If this will be a problem for you, get in touch with us ASAP. And if you don't know what any of that meant, don't worry about it.

• Friday evening: kick-off and API release
• Saturday: 19 hours of coding (the lab is open 24 hours, with a mandatory 5 hours of "break time" where each time must be entirely out of the lab)
• Sunday: End of MechMania competition

In order to properly be prepared for the MechMania AI programming contest, participants should be aware of the following C++ topics:

• Class inheritance, casting, subclasses
• STL lists and vectors
• General pointer logic
• Object oriented programming (Singletons, Factories, etc.)
• Namespaces and static functions

Knowledge of the GNU/Linux environment and development cycle will be helpful, although KDevelop is available for those accustomed to Visual Studio. The lab machines that the contest will be run on have:

• Fedora Core 2
• make (Makefiles will be provided)
• g++ compiler
• XEmacs, Emacs, vim, and KDevelop will be provided (Very little technical support is available for KDevelop)
• KDE 3 / GNOME 2

10th Annual Reflections | Projections Computing Conference • October 22 – 24, 2004 • Contact