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Battlesnake Developer Update - November 2022

ยท 2 min read
Chris Hoefgen

As Fall League finished up, the team was heads down working on infrastructure, with the biggest changes coming in the form of the new Rules 2.0 release!

Rules 2.0โ€‹

We did a big cleanup of the Rules project in November with the goal of making a 2.0 release. The goal of this cleanup was to remove a lot of legacy code and rework how the rulesets and maps work to make things a bit more intuitive. Although there are quite a few changes to the package's API, we ended up releasing this version as rules 1.2.0instead, because of some awkward requirements around Go packaging.

Updated Interfaceโ€‹

The previous interface was a bit of a mess handling legacy support for the dedicated Ruleset types along with the newer pipeline approach. Rob went in and removed all the legacy interfaces and settings arguments and built out a simpler, unified ruleset interface along with a variety of easy to use helpers. These new helpers make it much easier to create new rulesets and GameMaps.

TTLs!โ€‹

We have added new internal fields for storing Time To Live values for food and hazards, along with generic storage data for maps. This provides a variety of new ways to power interesting Game Map functionality.

New Pre-Update Hookโ€‹

We worked with experienced Battlesnake Developers, JonathanArns and coreyja, to add a new hook to the GameMap system to allow for board evaluation before the update step of the workflow runs. The new hook allows for new ways to manipulate state within a GameMap for more advanced map implementations.

CLI Bug Fixesโ€‹

We fixed a bug where the body of the last request (i.e. the /end request) wasn't being logged in the output file by the CLI.

You can check out all the code changes in the Release Notes.


That's all for now. If you have any questions, reach out to us on the Battlesnake Discord server.