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I am really excited about this. Here's some feedback from my first impressions:

1. Offline support: I'd love to work on this offline, write unit tests, use vim, all those nice things. You mentioned elsewhere that you're running the server-side simulation in Node—would be great if that was open sourced. :)

2. Better auto-saving: If offline support isn't available, editing online needs to be improved. I was messing around with my AI while on a shuttle with flaky WiFi. I saved my progress and navigated away. Later I came back, and turned out my progress was not saved. (a) Let me know if saving failed? (b) Maybe use LocalStorage as a fallback?

3. Better built-in library for common operations: o.lib.physics is a great start, but I'd love to not have to implement things like: "orbit around TARGET at distance X", "maintain distance X from TARGET", "orient towards (or away from) TARGET", etc. Sounds like these kinds of libraries could sprout organically from the community, but it's not obvious where to find them.



To implement point #3 would go against the spirit of the competition, I think. Part of the challenge is to implement a good core of navigation code.

Unit testing a physics simulation could be quite tricky too.


Unit testing a deterministic one is not too bad. Unit testing a stochastic physical system is a nightmare.


@3 I hope that they don't implement that. Good navigation code is half of the game.

If you want to see examples of competitions like this, many teams for Battlecode hosted by MIT have open sourced their code.




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