Robot Battle - History

History

Robot Battle was created by Brad Schick in 1994 and released to the public for free in the same year, when it reached version 1.2. It went through many versions until seeming to peak at 1.3 in 1995, until in 1997 David Finch released 1.33. The community was at that time held together by the Robot Battle Mailing List (RBML) (which was closed in February 2004 when the Robot Battle Registry, an Internet forum, opened), where tournaments were held, new players could be helped and complicated coding questions could be posed and answered.

Early in 2001 Brad began work on Robot Battle 1.4, which promised to be a massive upgrade. The RBML was alive with ideas, suggestions and offers to help, which resulted in the Robot Battle that new players will know, including new features such as:

• 3D robot graphics (created by Emmanuel Athans - http://www.manopolis.com/)
• New sound effects (created by Steve Simmons)
• New robot coding features
  • Sliding (originally a bug, but now an important feature for many robots)
  • XY Coordinates
  • Radio
  • Author and Version variables
  • Arrays
  • Loops
• Team setup options

Then in mid 2001 a small company called GarageGames showed an interest in Robot Battle and Brad agreed to sell the game through them. Soon after the first official 1.4 release in December 2002 work began on the Robot Battle Registry, a forum and a way of storing robots so that other people can download them, as well as a way to organise and advertise tournaments. The registry opened in May 2003.

Robot Battle has a steadily growing user base with communications over the Registry forums and IRC. At first the Registry was only available for people who had purchased the game but it has since been opened up to anybody.

Robot Battle is distributed under the MPL open source license, allowing anybody to read the code to help design robots or programs which interact with the game somehow.

The Robot Battle full version was published for free on November 23, 2004.