Early-stage project attempting to port the flash game IncrediBots 2 CE to TypeScript and PIXI.js.

Development environment instructions in what follows do not apply to the HTML5 version.

Thank you for downloading IncrediBots! Get ready to build, control, and share your very own robot creations in a physics-based playground!

To run IncrediBots or IncrediBots2, simply open the file incredibots.html or incredibots2.html in a web browser with flash player installed.

Enjoy!

The source code for the IB1 and IB2 game clients are located in the src/Incredibots and src/Incredibots2 subdirectories. Open up the actionscript IDE of your choice (I used Flex builder 3), and create a new project using the appropriate directory. The main runnable application file should be set to Main.as, and I used the param -default-frame-rate 30 as a compiler argument. Also make sure to link to the flGUI.swc library in the libs folder. The source code contains a few [Embed] statements, that I believe may only work with Flex builder, but other IDEs likely have similar methods of linking to assets.

Once everything is set up and the project compiles properly, the IDE should create a bin-debug folder (or something similar), containing the SWF and an HTML file that embeds the SWF. Now you'll be able to make changes to the code and see them reflected in the built SWF!

I'll give a basic overview of the key classes in the client side code, in hopes of making it clear how exactly everything works. The main application class is Main.as, which takes care of adding event listeners to the stage, and determining which 'Controller' class is active. You can think of a controller as loosely representing one type of 'screen.' There's one for the main menu, and then one for the main game screen, with subclasses for all the different types of main game screens (i.e 1 subclass per tutorial, 1 for sandbox mode, 1 for create challenge mode, etc.). The (unfortunately somewhat monolithic) class that handles most of the main robot editing functionality is ControllerGame, which has methods for responding to all the buttons and menu options that are available while editing a robot, as well as methods for handling creating, deleting, selecting, moving, and editing robot parts. The allParts Array in ControllerGame represents the robot currently being worked on, as an Array of Parts. It also handles starting and stopping the Box2D simulation

The Parts package contains class definitions for each type of 'Part available when building a robot. i.e. Circle, Rectangle, Fixed Joint, Rotating Joint, Thrusters, etc. Each instance of these classes contains all the data about that particular part, for example, a RevoluteJoint has member variables for joint strength, speed, whether or not the motor is enabled, control keys, which 2 shape parts it's attached to, etc. In the code, a 'Robot' or a 'Challenge' can be thought of as just an array of parts with a bit of metadata attached (i.e. sandbox settings, challenge restrictions).

The Actions package simply contains a list of actions that can be performed by the user when in edit mode. These actions are used solely by the 'Undo' and 'Redo' features, and each action knows what needs to be done to undo or redo it.

The Input class handles all keyboard and mouse interactions with non-GUI elements, and dispatches calls to the appropriate methods (usually in ControllerGame) to respond to a given mouse click or key press.

The Draw class deals with the drawing of robots to the screen. There are 2 cases it needs to deal with: edit mode, and simulation mode. When in edit mode, it draws all the shapes to the screen based on the current Array of Parts. When in sim mode, it draws the shapes based on the positioning of the Box2D representation of those parts, but it needs to make them look the same in both cases. In theory, this class is pretty modular, and should be able to be swapped out with an alternate class used for drawing to the screen fairly easily, in the event that you'd like to write your own methods for dealing with robot graphics.

The Gui package has a bunch of classes that build the various GUI panels and windows throughout the game. The most important of these is probably the SaveLoadWindow class, which handles displaying a list of robots available for load from the server. It also handles high scores, saving and loading robots, replays, and challenges, and searching for robots and such. It's currently disabled, since the servers are going down, but if another server ever goes up, this class will have to be modified. Other classes in this package include GuiWindow, which is the base class for all the little popup dialogs throughout the game, and components such as GuiButton, GuiTextArea, etc.

Finally, the Database class handles all interactions with the server. It has operations for saving and loading robots and replays, as well as for getting lists of each of these, and for logging in, creating a new user, uploading/downloading scores, and a few more. Each operation has a corresponding callback function, which processes the result returned by the server and returns the data back to the appropriate class for display. Of note are the functions PutXIntoByteArray and ExtractXFromByteArray, where X is one of 'Robot', 'Replay', or 'Challenge'. These functions are used to read and write in-game data to or from a flash ByteArray. The robot, replay, or challenge is then sent to the server as the POST data part of a URLRequest. These functions are also used by the 'Import' and 'Export' features, as an easy way of converting between in-game objects and text. If you want to add features that need to be saved along with a robot, replay, or challenge, you'll most likely need to put them in to one of these functions explicitly.

The server code is everything contained within the htdocs subfolder. It's written entirely in PHP. I'll talk about the database server code first.

The database code is in the ./src/htdocs/incredibots[1 or 2]/database/ directory. IncrediBots was build using Amazon S3 and SimpleDB as backends. You can read more about these at http://aws.amazon.com . Most of the DB server code is written specifically with this in mind, and unfortunately I never got around to refactoring it such that the database layer is abstracted within a common package. Thus it may be a lot of work to switch to something like MySQL, although it would work just as well as SimpleDB and S3 if properly maintained.

Note that IncrediBots also makes use of MySQL through the PHPBB forums database. Because we had a single login for both the game and the forums, all user accounts are managed through the forums' phpbb_users table. This is why the PHPBB forums code is included in the package, I had to make a few modifications to the forums code to get the single login working, as well as a few other features, such as the ability to embed robots within forum posts. That said, basic login and creating new accounts should work just fine with any version of phpbb running, and it shouldn't be too difficult to change the login functionality to work with whatever database/system you want.

The current database code should work fine out of the box with any Amazon AWS account. The only things that should need modifying are the credentials in the file common_variables.php. Apart from that, each ggscores_*.php file corresponds to one of the 20 or so DB operations the client can call. All calls are initially directed to ggscores.php, which includes the proper file corresponding to the 'op' parameter. Each operation then talks to the Amazon database (or phpbb_users table in MySQL) and echos out a response for the client. The binary data for all robots, replays, and challenges is sent to the server via HTTP POST data, and are saved in S3 as BLOBs, with a small amount of metadata for each stored in SimpleDB.

NOTE: One thing it may be a good idea to add is an MD5 checksum validation when sending the binary data from the client to the server, to guard against packet corruption. I know this has happened in the past a few times, and when it does, the affected robot/replay/challenge becomes corrupt, and is lost forever... (Dun dun dun!)

The rest of the server code contains mostly components of the IncrediBots website. The index.php page contains code to embed the SWF and display it properly. In order to host a SWF, you would just upload the SWF file that results from building the client, named incredibots.swf (or incredibots2.swf) to the same directory as index.php. The users.php page is also here, which displays all robots, replays, and challenges uploaded by a given user in a (somewhat) nicely formatted webpage.

IncrediBots was originally designed by Ryan Clark, programmed by Oliver Trujillo, with art from Matt Parry. A big amount of credit should also go to Erin Catto and the Box2D physics engine, as well as the Flash port of it upon which our game is built. http://www.box2d.org/ http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net/

IncrediBots is probably the game I've had the most fun working on. It's been a blast checking out all the crazy creations made by the IncrediBots community, and I wish you all the best in keeping IncrediBots going. Cheers and happy bot building!

• Oliver