Lambda Duct

Lambda Duct is an offline mode simulator for the Lambda Punter game. It acts as a bridge between a client in offline mode and an online game server.

Instructions

Installing

The program can either be automatically installed via OPAM

$ opam pin add lambda-duct https://github.com/icfpcontest2017/lambda-duct.git

or built from source using OCamlbuild

$ make

Either approach produces a binary lamduct. If built from source this binary must be manually installed into a suitable directory.

Troubleshooting

If you have trouble installing via OPAM it might be that your environment is out of sync. Try the following after installing opam.

opam switch 4.04.2
eval `opam config env`
opam pin add lambda-duct https://github.com/icfpcontest2017/lambda-duct.git

Running

The Lambda Duct binary takes as input the name of client program, i.e.

$ lamduct ./my_punter_program

This invokes my_punter_program expecting it to follow the offline mode protocol. By default the simulator connects to the remote host punter.inf.ed.ac.uk:9999. You can change this by passing a hostname and a port as arguments to the appropriate command line options. To see the list of options invoke lamduct --help.

$ lamduct --help
usage: lamduct [options] <client program>
Options are:
  --client-instance-logfile  Logging client instance stderr               (default: /dev/null)
  --client-instance-timeout  Maximum lifetime per client program instance (default: 10 seconds)
  --game-hostname            Hostname of the game server                  (default: punter.inf.ed.ac.uk)
  --game-port                Port to connect to on the game server        (default: 9999)
  --log-level                Logging level for lamduct (values: 0 to 3)   (default: 0)
  --version                  Print version and exit
  -help                      Display this list of options
  --help                     Display this list of options

Lambda Duct communicates with the client program via its standard in and standard out, meaning that the client program must only write well-formed Lambda Punter messages to standard out. In other words: do not write any debugging information to standard out. Instead use standard error to print debugging information. By default the client program's standard error is redirected to /dev/null, however, this behaviour can be changed by providing a file name to --client-instance-logfile, e.g.

$ lamduct --client-instance-logfile punt.log my_punter_program

Lambda Duct can itself be made to produce some debugging information. The log level option (--log-level) determines the degree of information produced:

• Level 0 is the least logging level which only prints errors
• Level 1 prints (some possibly helpful) warnings.
• Level 2 produces information about regarding client program instances and communication with the online server.
• Level 3 does the same as level 2, but more verbosely.

Timeouts

Lambda Duct does not simulate offline mode timeouts. The timeout policy is determined by the online game server.