Coding4Fun Pushing the .NET Envelope

Article
02/21/2007

Coding4Fun is off the hook lately! Check out these great apps that are pushing the envelope in fun and cool ways

Scott Hanselman's Controlling a Microbric Viper Robot using Windows PowerShell Logo

Yeah,PowerShell logo embedded into a Windows Form that can programatically control Robots. (Video demo)

Video: Programming Unreal Tournament AI bots

Andy Sterland, James Lissiak, and Tom Randell .NET Powered Unreal Tournament AI Bots

To show off how easy it is to program Unreal Tournament bots, I created my own "bot" which searches for a player called Dan and kills him on-site. It's that easy! Andy, James, and Tom wrote this while students at University of Hull (UK), and they even held a tournament with students competing to create the best bot.

Visual Basic

    1:      Protected Overloads Overrides Sub PerformActions()

    2:          If Me.CurrentGameState.PlayersVisible.Count > 0 Then

    3:              'You have someone visible you can shoot at

    4:              Dim allPlayers As List(Of UTBotOppState) = Me.CurrentGameState.PlayersVisible

    5:              For Each player As UTBotOppState In allPlayers

    6:                  If player.Name = "Dan" Then

    7:                      Console.WriteLine("Attack Dan, His health is: " & player.Health)

8:

    9:                      'the "false" is asking to use alt fire (ex: grenades)

   10:                      Me.BotCommands.Shoot(player.Location, False)

11:

   12:                  End If

   13:              Next

14:

   15:          Else 'If no visible players, jump and rotate by 90 degrees

   16:              Me.BotCommands.Jump()

   17:              Me.BotCommands.RotateBy(90)

   18:          End If

   19:      End Sub

Visual C#

    1:  protected override void PerformActions()

    2:  {

    3:      //Get a count of visible players

    4:      if (this.CurrentGameState.PlayersVisible.Count > 0)

    5:      {

    6:          //You have someone visible you can shoot at

    7:          List<UTBotOppState> allPlayers = this.CurrentGameState.PlayersVisible;

8:

    9:          foreach (UTBotOppState player in allPlayers)

   10:          {

   11:              if (player.Name == "Dan")

   12:              {

   13:                  Console.WriteLine("Attack Dan, His health is: " + player.Health);

   14:                  //the "false" is asking to use alt fire (ex: grenades)

   15:                  this.BotCommands.Shoot(player.Location, false);

   16:              }

   17:          }

   18:      }

   19:      else //if no visible players, jump and rotate by 90 degrees

   20:      {

   21:          this.BotCommands.Jump();

   22:          this.BotCommands.RotateBy(90);

   23:      }

   24:  }

Brian Peek's Computer-Controlled R/C Car with Wireless Camera

Brian shows how to hack an R/C controller to drive an R/C from your computer, all using Microsoft Robotics Studio. This is so cool that I've asked him to send me one so I can create "Drive my car" Web app for Microsofties to take the car for a spin remotely.

Mark Harbakus iAccelerate Application

See how fast and furious your car is by using an Accelerometer. This is too tempting to try out :)

Arian Kulp's iTunes-Style Desktop Search

It works on Vista and it's very cool! My favorite features is the search by Old-ness and the dynamic categories. I was easily able to search for pictures from last year with a 200 ISO speed in fractions of a second. Arian has another mod (part 2) that I'm sure will be equally cool and useful.

This is just a sampling of recently posted articles by our rock-star authors...we have lots more cool content coming down the pipeline :)

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