If you plan to develop your entry in Java you need to download and install the latest Java 8 Development Kit.

The sample bot also uses Maven for building and dependency management - detailed instructions for installing it are provided below.

Installation is fairly simple:

• Maven is free software that can be downloaded here (local mirrors are available).
• Install as per the included README.txt:
  • Ensure the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to the root of your JDK installation (eg. on Windows: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk8).
  • Extract the .zip / .tar.gz archive.
  • Add the bin folder from the extracted directory to your path.
  • Verify that the installation is working by starting a new command line and running mvn --version it should output something similar to:

Apache Maven 3.3.1 (cab6659f9874fa96462afef40fcf6bc033d58c1c; 2015-03-13T22:10:27+02:00)
Maven home: c:\DevTools\Java\maven-3.3.1
Java version: 1.8.0_40, vendor: Oracle Corporation
Java home: c:\DevTools\Java\jdk8u40\jre
Default locale: en_GB, platform encoding: Cp1252
OS name: "windows 7", version: "6.1", arch: "amd64", family: "dos"

If you need to use any libraries in your bot simply include the dependencies in your project's pom.xml.

Download the zip file from Github or use Git to clone the repository:

• Start Git Bash
• Change to the directory where you want to checkout the sample bot
• Run: git clone https://github.com/EntelectChallenge/2015-SpaceInvaders-Bot-Java.git

The easiest way to compile is to open a Command Prompt, change to your bot folder and run compile.bat. This will use Maven to fetch your dependencies and build your bot.

Once you have compiled you can do a basic test of the bot by simply launching a Command Prompt, changing to the bot directory and running run.bat output. This will use the example state and map files in the output folder.