Robocode Tank Royale

Build the best – destroy the rest!

🤖 About

Robocode is a programming game where the goal is to code a bot in the form of a virtual tank that competes against other bots in a virtual battle arena.

The player writes a program that controls the bot’s movement, scanning, firing, and reactions to events during a battle. All logic lives inside this program – you never control the bot directly.

The name Robocode is short for “Robot code” and comes from the original version here.
Robocode Tank Royale is the next evolution, where bots can play over the Internet via WebSocket.

This project aims to help you learn programming, improve AI skills in a fast‑running real‑time game, and have fun while competing.

⚔️ Example of a battle

🌟 Explore More

Resource	Why it matters	Link
📘 The Book of Robocode	The advanced companion to Tank Royale docs with deeper strategy content on movement, targeting, radar control, energy management, and competition-level tactics.	Open the Book
🖥️ Tank Royale Viewer	A dedicated web-based viewer for showing live battles, analyzing recordings, and putting matches on big screens during competitions.	Open the Viewer

📘 The Book of Robocode

Want to go beyond the fundamentals? The Book of Robocode is the advanced companion to these docs and covers both Robocode and Robocode Tank Royale.

Start here:

• Your First Bot
• Radar & Scanning
• Targeting
• Movement & Evasion
• Energy & Scoring

🖥️ Tank Royale Viewer

Want to visualize battles in style? Check out the Tank Royale Viewer — a web-based viewer for watching Robocode Tank Royale matches in real time.

Created by Jan Durovec, it is especially useful for:

• displaying live battles on big monitors during competitions
• analyzing recorded battles
• showcasing tournament and championship matches

📚 Documentation

Main page: Robocode Tank Royale Docs

🚀 Start here

If you want to...	Start here
Install and run Tank Royale	Installation guide
Learn the basics	Getting Started
Build your first bot	My First Bot
Learn advanced strategy	The Book of Robocode
Watch battles in a dedicated viewer	Tank Royale Viewer
Run battles headlessly from code	Battle Runner API docs

🏆 Tank Royale Rumble

Explore the community-ranked competition: learn how to submit a bot, run ranked battles, or view current rankings.

💻 Supported platforms

Robocode runs on Java 11 or newer and supports Windows, macOS, and Linux out of the box.
Bot APIs are available for:

• Python
• Java (JVM)
• .NET
• TypeScript / JavaScript

Bots can be written in any language that can access a WebSocket API and follows the protocol.

The following official Bot APIs provide full client implementations. They are maintained by the Tank Royale project and are semantically 1:1 with the Java reference implementation, so a bot author moving between them does not have to relearn behavior:

Language	API
Python	Python Bot API
Java (JVM)	Java/JVM Bot API
.NET	.NET Bot API
TypeScript / JavaScript	TypeScript Bot API

The official set is closed at these four languages. Bot APIs for other languages are welcome as community Bot APIs: independent projects maintained beside official Tank Royale rather than by it, which we are happy to link from the API documentation. See the Contributing Guide for how that works and what it would take to reopen the official set.

Additional languages supported by the Java/JVM API:

• Java
• Groovy
• Kotlin
• Scala
• Jython
• Clojure

Supported .NET languages:

• C#
• F#
• Visual Basic
• IronPython

⚙️ Battle Runner API

The Battle Runner API lets you run battles programmatically from any JVM application — no GUI required. Use it for automated testing, benchmarking, or building tournament systems.

BattleRunner.create { embeddedServer() }.use { runner ->
    val results = runner.runBattle(
        setup = BattleSetup.classic { numberOfRounds = 10 },
        bots  = listOf(BotEntry.of("/path/to/MyBot"), BotEntry.of("/path/to/EnemyBot"))
    )
    println("Winner: ${results.results.first().name}")
}

Available on Maven Central as dev.robocode.tankroyale:robocode-tankroyale-runner. See the Battle Runner API docs or the module README for full documentation.

🚧 Work in progress

• Robocode API bridge for Tank Royale – see the robocode-api-bridge project.

Thanks to the contributors

Huge thanks to every contributor — you make this project shine! 🙌

👨‍💻 Maintainer

@flemming-n-larsen

📄 License

Apache License 2.0

©️ Copyright

Copyright © 2022 Flemming N. Larsen