Grobots
Grobots is a game in which robots eat, fight, and reproduce under the control of programs written by the players. It runs on Mac OS, Windows, and (without graphics) Linux. Read the overview or look at some screenshots.
We like to hear from our users. Send us your questions, comments, and sides. There's also a mailing list.
News
Zoom!
(Devon 20070912) New experimental feature: the main view can be zoomed in and out by typing '+' and '-'. ('0' returns to the default scale.) This means you have more flexibility in how much of the world you can see at once.
(Devon 20070930) That flexibility includes making the minimap larger and more detailed than the main view. :) But Warren improved the graphics yesterday, so it doesn't actually look bad. The main view is also smarter about scrolling when following now.
Nativity
(Devon 20061227) There's now a native OS X build, based on a patch by Daniel von Fange. Some niceties are still missing (no icon, dragging sides to the application doesn't work) but at least you don't need Classic any more.
For interoperability (particularly important when switching from Grobots Classic), Grobots now recognizes either CR or LF as a newline. This works on all platforms, so you no longer need to worry about converting line endings.
[Old news]
Recent Changes
- (20071026) Renamed
Misc
expenditures to Brains
, since that's all it is.
- (20071003) Added
and-nif.
- (20070930) Types view now shows damage multiplier for large types, and multiplier when pregnant with the same type.
- (20070929) Main view avoids walls when following.
- (20070929) Zoom keys in minimap now affect main view.
- (20070929) Increased minimap maximum size.
- (20070929) Improved appearance when zoomed in or out.
- (20070928) [Mac] Now redraws after handling an event.
- (20070928) Fixed crash when selecting manually added shots. (Patch from Borg.)
- (20070928) [Windows] Fixed bug handling keystrokes (now converting from virtual key to char).
- (20070912) Reduced frequency of annoying seed placement warning.
- (20070912) Minor changes to build under MSVC 2005.
- (20070912) Fixed a bug (2e-32 isn't 2^-32!) in
GBRandomState::FloatInRange, so colors of duplicated sides are properly random now.
- (20070912) The main view is now zoomable by typing '+' or '-'. ('0' restores the default scale.)
- (20070909) Tournament results window now redraws when the number of sides changes.
- (20070623) [Windows] Windows that shouldn't be resizeable no longer are. (Patch from Borg.)
- (20070623) Fixed bug loading files that are a multiple of 512 bytes long. (Patch from Borg.)
- (200701 or so) [Windows] Fixed bug loading multiple sides at once when one is a shortcut.
- (20070113) Various optimizations.
[old changes]
Download
Grobots is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License. There are currently five builds:
- Mac OS X (512 KB). If you're a new user, get the starter kit (756KB), which includes some sides and a copy of the documentation. (This runs on both PPC and x86.)
- Mac OS Classic (404KB). If you're a new user, get the starter kit (505KB), which includes some sides and a copy of the documentation. (The Classic binaries are built with MrCpp, so they require MrCExceptionsLib (7KB) (included in the starter kit). They also require StdCLib (45KB), but you probably already have that.)
- Windows (308KB). If you're a new user, get the starter kit (516KB), which includes some sides and a copy of the documentation.
- Windows Headless (268KB). This has no GUI, but it can run tournaments.
- Linux x86 Headless (168 KB). This may be useful for people with fast Linux machines and slow other ones, to run tournaments. You can't learn the game with just headless, though.
Screenshots
Grobots is more interesting in motion. These screenshots show the colors but not the action.
[Old screenshots]
Devon Schudy
and Warren Schudy
