UNSW Battlecode

unswbc is the toolkit for UNSW CPMSoc's Battlecode competition. It creates a bot project, builds it with the compiler already on your machine, and plays two bots against each other on a map, writing a replay you can watch.

Install

unswbc is a Python package. Install uv first.

macOS and Linux

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Windows, in PowerShell

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

Open a new shell so uv is on your PATH. Then install the toolkit:

uv tool install unswbc

That puts unswbc on your PATH. Upgrade with uv tool upgrade unswbc, and pin a version with uv tool install unswbc==0.3.1.

Without uv

Possible, but not recommended. You need Python 3.11 or newer already installed, and you manage the environment yourself:

python3 -m venv ~/.unswbc && ~/.unswbc/bin/pip install unswbc

unswbc then lives at ~/.unswbc/bin/unswbc. Put that directory on your PATH to run it by name. Plain pip install --user unswbc is not an option: most Linux distributions and Homebrew refuse it.

The same wheel runs on macOS, Linux and Windows. It carries the game engine, every contest map and the VS Code replay viewer, so there is nothing else to download. It runs your bots with the tools already on your machine, so for C or C++ bots you still need a compiler.

Your first bot

unswbc init python mybot
unswbc run maps/arena.map mybot mybot

init writes a working bot and a helper library into mybot/, and adds missing contest maps to a shared maps/ folder beside it. Existing maps are never overwritten, even with init --force. run takes a map and exactly two bots, builds both and plays them, then writes a .replay file. Name the same project twice to play it against itself.

Leave the language out and init asks for it, so unswbc init mybot works too.

After upgrading the toolkit, run unswbc maps to add newly bundled maps to maps/ without creating a bot. You can choose another folder with unswbc maps path/to/maps. When initializing a bot in the current directory, the shared map folder is ../maps/; use unswbc maps ../maps to update it.

unswbc                 # the commands, and what this machine is missing
unswbc --build         # the same, but compile a test program too
unswbc run <map> a b   # two different bots
unswbc run <map> a b --no-replay
unswbc init python     # writes into the current directory
unswbc log             # the errors this machine has hit
unswbc help <command>

Submitting

Make an API key on your team page, give it to unswbc once, then upload from the command line. The zip holds bot.toml and the files project.include names, laid out the way the judge wants:

unswbc auth set bc_...            # keeps it in ~/.unswbc/keys.json, one key per server
unswbc auth status                # which server, which key, which team
unswbc submit mybot               # upload the project in mybot/
unswbc submit mybot -n v12 -d "wider search"
unswbc auth clear                 # forget the key for this server

The version is named after the folder and the date unless -n says otherwise. UNSWBC_KEY overrides the stored key, for CI.

When something breaks

Every error unswbc prints is also appended to ~/.unswbc/log. unswbc log shows it. Quote it when you ask for help.

A bot is an ordinary process: unswbc writes the board to its stdin each turn and reads the move back from stdout. Anything that can read and write text can play.

In the judge

The judge runs bots inside a WebAssembly sandbox, so the same code behaves the same on every machine, and it measures work in CPU points rather than seconds: each WebAssembly instruction has a fixed price, so a slow judge day cannot cost you a turn.

A turn over its budget gives no reply, and a dragon that gives no reply dies that turn, so leave yourself a margin. A dragon's first turn is no exception: the interpreter and NumPy are already loaded, but your own imports and setup count, so spread heavy precomputation over turns or do it lazily. Prices, in points: most instructions 1, loads and stores 2, division 3, calls 4 to 6, memory growth 50, bulk copies and fills 10 plus 1 per 8 bytes, and 2 for everything else, which includes 128-bit SIMD. Writing output costs 2.5 million per write plus 4,000 per byte, so keep logging light.

Rough costs to plan around: parsing a round in the Python helper is ~10 million points, a full-map flood fill on 32x32 is ~19 million in Python and ~0.3 million in C++. C and C++ are compiled with -O2 -msimd128 against the C standard library and libc++, with the zip's own directory on the include path; there are no other libraries, so vendor any you need as source. Vector code is priced like scalar code and runs as real SIMD, so it is worth writing. Python runs on CPython 3.13 with the standard library and NumPy 2.5, nothing else, so vendor any pure-Python code you need.

Output is sent when you flush, and a flush is one write. The helpers flush once, at the end of the turn, and reading your next turn flushes too, so leave it that way: a bot that flushes after every line pays 2.5 million points a line. In C++ that means no std::unitbuf, no cin.tie(nullptr) unless you flush at ENDTURN yourself, and std::clog rather than std::cerr for debug output. To C and C++ the judge's stdout looks like a terminal (isatty is true), so C stdio is line buffered: with sync_with_stdio(false) every line that ends in \n goes out as its own write, at 2.5 million points each. Python is unaffected, since the helper's stdout is fully buffered. A wait that nothing can end, such as taking a lock twice on your only thread, ends the turn over budget at once.

Matches are reproducible: randomness comes from a generator seeded per dragon and match, and the clock advances with the points you spend, so time.sleep costs no real time and timing your own search measures points.

Watching replays

The VS Code extension opens any .replay file as an interactive board with a game log, per-team statistics and charts. unswbc ships it and installs it when unswbc init creates a project, so there is nothing to download. To redo that at any point:

unswbc vscode

Replays also open at game.battlecode.au, which uses the same renderer.