Yeah, I am still alive.

For the record, in my spare time I am hacking out a community website to exchange Robot designs for Robot Arena 2; their exchange just doesn't cut it.

So far, I have analysed the .bot and .gmf file formats, and have done some rudimentary exports of both formats to VRML. The .bot file format was easy, it's mostly newline-separated (albeit unlabelled) data with some bitmaps thrown in for good measure; .gmf was a bit harder to crack, until I realised it is essentially a binary version of the 3D Studio Max .ase export format.

Using this we can have 3D previews of uploaded bots. In the process, I learned more about linear algebra than I care; decomposing a 3D Studio Max tranformation matrix into rotation, transformation and scale components was, hmm, 'interesting'. I'll see about releasing the Python version of the Graphics Gems IV algorithms someday.