Welcome to Sneks’ documentation!

Sneks in SPACE

Build the behavior for your Snek and upload it at sneks.dev/submit to see how it does against other submitters. See the website for live results and details regarding scoring and submission help.

Getting started

Prerequisites

  1. Install Python >=3.10 from python.org/downloads

    1. Add Python to your Path to make things easier

  2. (Optional) Install an IDE to work in

    1. PyCharm Community Edition (Note: scroll down for the free Community edition)

    2. Visual Studio Code

  3. Download template.zip to your local machine from sneks.dev/template/template.zip and extract its contents.

Set up development environment

  1. Open a terminal or command prompt

  2. Change to the directory where the template is located. After unzipping, it should be the directory called space-sneks-submission-main.

    1. You should be located in the same directory as pyproject.toml

  3. (Optional, but recommended) Set up a virtual environment

    1. Create virtual environment

      python -m venv venv

    2. Activate the environment

      1. macOS / Linux

        source venv/bin/activate

      2. Windows

        venv\Scripts\activate

        1. If you get an error saying your execution policy prevents the running of the activate script, you can disable that policy temporarily with Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Scope Process.

  4. Install this package to enable testing locally

    pip install --editable .

  5. Ensure everything works by trying out the helper scripts

    1. Test that the current snake passes validation

      validate

    2. Run the current snake by itself

      run

Develop your Snek

In src/submission/submission.py, modify the logic of get_next_action() to control your Snek’s behavior. See sneks.dev/docs for documentation of the classes and helper functions available to help refine your Snek. There are also a couple example Sneks in src/examples that can be used as starting points.

Configuration

In src/scripts/config.py, there are some values that can be changed to tune how the game performs locally. Each step in the game has a delay afterwards, defaulting to 40ms. Likewise, after the end of a run, the game pauses for a default of one second. These can be changed to your liking, with the added option of requiring a keypress to advance the snake. With either WAIT_FOR_KEYPRESS option set to True, the snake will not move unless a key is pressed. Holding down a key will continuously advance the snake.

Updating the submission template dependencies

If directed by your contest coordinator, you can use the following command to update the submission template dependencies to the latest version:

pip install --upgrade --upgrade-strategy eager --editable .

Contents:

Indices and tables