Running player code

To run a game with a single player that is specified by source code in examples/better_cognitive.py:

$ spectrumwars_runner -l example.log examples/better_cognitive.py

You can add more players to the game by specifying more Python files to the command line.

Note

By default spectrumwars_runner uses a simulated testbed that does not require any special hardware. If you have testbed-specific hardware installed, you can specify the testbed to use using the -t command line argument. For example, to run the game using the VESNA testbed, use:

$ spectrumwars_runner -t vesna -l example.log examples/better_cognitive.py

In this case, spectrumwars_runner automatically finds any USB-connected VESNA nodes and assigns them randomly to players.

However, this is mostly intended for testbed developers. Playing SpectrumWars on a real testbed is usually done through a web interface.

While the game is running, you will see some debugging information on the console. In the end, some game statistics are printed out:

Results:
Player 1:
    crashed             : False
    transmitted packets : 93
    received packets    : 51 (45% packet loss)
    transferred payload : 12801 bytes (avg 981.4 bytes/s)

Game time: 13.0 seconds

If player code raised an unhandled exception at some point you will also see a backtrace. This should assist you in debugging the problem.

spectrumwars_runner allows you to set the game end conditions using the command-line arguments. Run spectrumwars_runner --help to see a list of supported arguments with descriptions. Also note that the capabilities of the simulation testbed can be customized to more closely resemble one of the real SpectrumWars testbeds. See Simulated testbed.

In addition to the ASCII log that is printed on the console, the game controller also saves a binary log file to example.log. The binary log contains useful debugging information about events that occurred during the game. You can visualize the log by running:

$ spectrumwars_plot -o example.out example.log

This creates a directory example.out with a few images in it. One visualization is created for each player participating in the game. These are named player0.png, player1.png and so on, using the same order as it was used on the spectrumwars_runner command line. One additional visualization named game.png is created showing the overall progress of the game.

See Understanding the visualizations on how to read the graphs produced by spectrumwars_plot.