What’s better than writing/building virtual robot tanks in .Net and having them battle it out? Having them battle Java virtual tanks!

Coding4Fun - Robocode – robot warfare

“Robocode just released a new version of their software which now allows you to use .Net coded robots!  Awesome job guys.  They have a post regarding their implementation and their wiki has a quick example to get you up and running and they also include API references for Robocode.

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Robocode (Blog) - Robocode 1.7.2.0 Beta - The ".NET robots are now supported" release

“We are proud to announce the 1.7.2.0 Beta release of Robocode, which is the first version to support .NET robots via using a plugin for Robocode. A lot of hard work has been put into the .NET support by Pavel Savara.

With the .NET plugin for Robocode, Java and .NET robots can participate in the same battles in the same time. [GD: Emphasis added]

You can read our first article on the RoboWiki about how to create a .NET robot with Visual Studio and run it in Robocode.

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Robocode (Home)

“Robocode is a programming game, where the goal is to develop a robot battle tank to battle against other tanks in Java or .NET. The robot battles are running in real-time and on-screen

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Robowiki - Robocode/.NET/Create a .NET robot with Visual Studio

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Creating a .NET robot in Visual Studio

From version 1.7.2.0, Robocode supports robots that run under Microsoft .NET framework CLR. Note that .NET robots will only be able to run on operating systems that support the .NET framework 2.0. For now, Mono is not supported due to current limitations of jni4net.

This tutorial assumes that you are familiar with .NET programming. In addition, this tutorial is made for C# programmers, but it should be easy to use this tutorial for Visual Basic .NET or other .NET programming languages instead.

Prerequisites

1. Robocode and Java must be installed on your system (see System Requirements and Download).
2. .NET plug-in for Robocode must be installed on top of your existing Robocode directory. The .NET plug-in is named like this: robocode.dotnet-xxxx-setup.jar, and you can install it by double-clicking on it, which will start the installer.
3. Visual Studio 2005 or newer is required, but Visual Studio 2008 is strongly recommended. You can download one of the Express Edition, which comes for free.

Note that you don't need Visual Studio for developing .NET robots. You can use Microsoft .NET SDK 2.0 if you wish. However, this tutorial will make use of Visual Studio C# 2008 Express Edition, and hence already have it downloaded and installed

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Robots, .Net, OSS, tanks, virtual battles and free?! Shiny!