In this guide, we will list a couple of simple, useful practices to follow when building your Halite bot.
Stdout and stdin in are used to communicate with the game environment. As such, you cannot use functions like System.out.println, print(), or std::cout. Instead, print debugging information to a log file.
Before submitting a new bot to the online leaderboard, we recommend running some games against the version of your bot that is currently on the leaderboard. If your new bot consistently wins, then put it up!
When debugging latency issues with your bot, it can be helpful to disable game environment timeouts. To do so, append the -t flag to your environment command (e.g. ./environment -d "30 30" "python3 MyBot.py" "python3 RandomBot.py" -t).
There is a community contributed method for running a Halite bot from a custom debugger locally. More on this can be found here on the forums.