Bot Playtesting Toolkit v. 1.1 released

This blogpost was moved here from https://creatingboardgames.wordpress.com/2022/01/20/bot-playtesting-toolkit-v-1-1-released/

It seems only yesterday that version 1.0 of the Bot Playtesting Toolkit was released, and today a bunch of new functionality was added.

The most work has been done on improving the Track class, used for describing not only linear tracks but also grids of connected spaces. A cool function in version 1.0 is, in my humble opinion, that the toolkit automatically can find the shortest path to a space on the board and also the distance to it. In version 1.1 there are several additions that are pretty cool, too:

• Get all spaces within a given distance, or all spaces at a certain distance. Useful if you want to check who will be affected by that earth quake spell, or to see which Pandemic cities you can reach if you move three steps.
• Get all connected spaces with a certain property. Useful for creatures that move freely within the forest, or if you want to calculate points in Kingdomino.
• Check whether two spaces are connected by a line of sight. Useful for those ranged ranged weapons, fireballs, heal-at-a-distance spells and whatnot. I am particularly happy about getting this working in a way that allows different criteria for line of sight, defaulting to a line connecting center-to-center of the spaces.

Another improvement is that pawns, used on tracks, are now a class of their own. This makes easier to move the pawns about, and also to add arbitrary properties to the pawns.

I also moved the documentation to the version controlled files in the repository. This means that whichever version of the Bot Playtesting Toolkit is downloaded, the relevant documentation will be brought with it. This would be difficult to do in the project wiki (which either will be shut down or get content of a different nature).

I am happy that I have tests included in the Bot Playtesting Toolkit. They have helped me find bugs, and reassured me that things work as expected when I’ve rewritten parts of the code. Automated tests rocks.

Want to try it out? Either make a copy of the 1.1 template right away or, perhaps wiser, read about how to get started.