I actually couldn't get the stepladder tournament to work... not sure what I did wrong. Followed the instructions. It restarts, but doesn't start the stepladder league.
I don't have the source checked out, and not gonna go there at this time. No time for it, and remember how much the global variables in VB6 bugged me last time I had a look at it.
On that other subject, we wouldn't need to keep updating bots all the time, but would be cool there was a default path set, pointing at a folder with the top 30 F1 bots from some date (Wouldn't need to be updated all the time, should just have something).
Basically the first thing I did when I downloaded DB the first time was to start working on an F1 league bot, and I kept running the F1 league in stepladder mode to see how far it would get. When it got beat I would be running it against the bot who beat it, and once I could beat that bot I would go back to running the stepladder, eager to see how far it would make it now.
Like an old school Van Dam movie or something.
For me this had a lot of appeal and I really enjoyed that part. And I think there may be a lot of people who are into programming games who would enjoy this part as well, so would be cool if it was just ready to go. Basically just add your bot and hit some button to run it against the F1 league. (Could be a button bellow the 3 buttons who adjust the settings that simply launches the stepladder league with the bot you have added as the contender.)
Btw, will chloroplast be enabled for the competing bots in F1 mode?
Seems like there would be some endless battles. Basically any bots that amass chloroplast and aren't able to kill the opponent will end up fighting forever. Some fights can take ages already, with endless nrg supply it'll just be endless for some fights. You could enter bots that only run away and defend themselves but never attack, and any bot that can't keep up with it would have an endless match right there already...
(But gonna see how my new version of Fruit Flies does on IM though)