Treadcore

four tanks · one island · the airspace around each one

A four-player overhead tank game for the battlefield the tank was just handed. The gun fires indirect, like artillery, at map coordinates a recon drone is watching. The tank stays alive the way a carrier does: by owning a ring of airspace around itself with interceptor drones flown off its own hull. A shell comes down through that ring regardless. That is the game.

The tank is the mobile command. Everything it deploys, it deploys from itself.

Source Concept Design

git clone git@github.com:treadcore/treadcore.git
cd treadcore
make configure
make run         # solo against three bots
make lan         # LAN lobby, elects a host
make debug       # a full bot match, traced to build/logs/

The drone crew

drone	job	the number that matters
recon	orbits a point, sees 12 tiles, feeds the gun	a spotted shell lands within 0.6 tiles; blind, within 4
interceptor	holds station on the bubble, rams what flies in	90% kill on a good link, 50% on a dead one; one shot each
strike	the FPV: flies to an enemy tank and dives	35 of 100 armor, if it gets through

The HUD

TREADCORE solo: three bots tick 2140 107.0s seat 0 pos ( 41.2, 33.8) hdg -38 spd 0.0 armor [############....] 74 fuel [#############...] 488 shells 17/24 gun READY bay recon 1 intercept 3 strike 3 bubble 6.0 tiles (150 m) !! UNDER FIRE !! AIR kind link batt task #31 Recon 82% 96s station r4 #44 Inter 91% 61s station r6 #45 Inter 63% 58s INTERCEPT #52 #47 Inter 88% 40s station r6 hostile air seen 3 inside detection 1 hostile tanks seen 1

On the map: the bubble as a ring, every link as a line from tank to drone going green to red with distance, the recon's vision as a disc over the enemy, every shell as an arc with its impact point growing as it falls.

No server

Each process beacons the LAN, pings every peer it finds, publishes a row of the latency matrix, and runs the same election on the same matrix: the host is the peer whose worst link to anyone is best, and anyone the host cannot reach directly sends through the neighbour that can. Bolo's ring, as a tree. The protocol.

Brains

A Brain gets the same observation the window draws and returns commands the world validates like anyone else's. A bot in Python is a program that reads one JSON line and writes one. The interface.

Repository

directory	holds
source/	the six Rust crates: sim, proto, net, brain, server, client
documentation/	concept, design, protocol, research with sources, the lab report
vendor/	external code and blobs vendored by the author, each with its licence
scripts/	what the Makefile calls

Reports

Opening day, 12 October 2026: the vision, the research, what was built, what was learned, where it goes next.

Concept · Design · Protocol · What it is modelled on · Lab report · Source