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Developing JVM bots on Linux and MacOS

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Jasper Geurtz edited this page Jan 20, 2026 · 4 revisions

Developping JVM bots on Linux, MacOS and other OS's that wine and java work on, is actually quite easy as the generated jar's are platform independant.

This makes it easy to:

  • code & compile on MacOS/Linux
  • run StarCraft, Chaoslauncherand the jar in wine

Note

1) Installing required packages

wine

Install wine for your operating system by following the instructions here Any recent (9.0+) version should work.

$ wine --version
wine-11.0

If you don't have a .wine folder in your home folder yet. You can generate one using

$ winecfg

starcraft

Follow the instructions here

But move everything to .wine/drive_c/starcraft/ instead

$ pwd
/home/user/.wine/drive_c  # home/user might look different on MacOS
$ cd starcraft/
$ ls
APM_check        EditLocal.dll  maps             SEditESP.loc   STARDAT.MPQ
battle.snp       iccscbn.icc    nocd1151.bwl     SEditFRA.loc   StarEdit.cnt
bncache.dat      iccwc3.icc     patch_rt.mp_     SEditITA.loc   StarEdit.exe
BnetLog.txt      install.ex_    patch_rt.mpq     SEditPTB.loc   StarEdit.hlp
BNUpdate.exe     InstCC.exe     patch.txt        SEditPTG.loc   storm.dll
bnupdate.log     JoinAlert.wav  ReadMe.txt       SETUP.EXE      unins000.dat
BROODAT.MPQ      Launcher.exe   RepAnalyser.dll  Smackw32.dll   unins000.exe
BwarInst.log     License.html   Riched20.dll     standard.snp   w3lh.dll
Chaosplugin.bwl  Local.dll      SEditDEU.loc     StarCraft.exe
characters       __log.txt      SEditENU.loc     StarCraft.mpq

bwapi

Download the latest compatible bwapi installer.

And run it with

$ wine BWAPI_Setup.exe

Select StarCraft from your wine C:/ drive when prompted.

Follow the the remaining Chaoslauncher instructions from the main tutorial.

openjdk

Download and install the Java JDK 8 Windows variant (for example from Adoptium )

And install it via wine

$ wine start OpenJDK8U-jdk_x64_windows_hotspot_8u242b08.msi

note: the start after wine in the command is to open an msi installer

You can check it installed correctly by looking in your wine C:/ drive

$ pwd
/home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/AdoptOpenJDK/jdk-8.0.242.08-hotspot
$ ls
ASSEMBLY_EXCEPTION  demo     jre  LICENSE  sample   THIRD_PARTY_README
bin                 include  lib  release  src.zip
$ cd jre/bin
$ wine java.exe -version
openjdk version "1.8.0_242"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (AdoptOpenJDK)(build 1.8.0_242-b08)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (AdoptOpenJDK)(build 25.242-b08, mixed mode)

maven (optional)

This tutorial uses maven to build the jars

Example installation commands

MacOS

brew install maven

Ubuntu

sudo apt install maven

Now we should be good to go!

2) Coding & Building on MacOS/Linux

Let's create a small bot that displays Hello World in StarCraft based on the jbwapi-template

$ git clone https://github.com/JavaBWAPI/jbwapi-bot-template.git
Cloning into 'jbwapi-bot-template'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 14, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (14/14), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (9/9), done.
remote: Total 14 (delta 1), reused 10 (delta 1), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (14/14), done.
$ cd jbwapi-bot-template
$ mvn package
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] 
[INFO] ---------------------< org.jbwapi:jbwapi-template >---------------------
[INFO] Building jbwapi-template 1.0-SNAPSHOT
[INFO] --------------------------------[ jar ]---------------------------------

...

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time:  44.924 s
[INFO] Finished at: 2020-03-04T14:48:47-05:00
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Run your bot (change USERNAME to your username, path may differ on different operating systems)

$ wine /home/USERNAME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/AdoptOpenJDK/jdk-8.0.242.08-hotspot/jre/bin/java.exe -jar target/jbwapi-template-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar

Run Chaoslauncher

$ wine /home/USERNAME/.wine/drive_c/users/USERNAME/BWAPI/Chaoslauncher/Chaoslauncher.exe

Start a game, and voila, there should be "Hello World" written somewhere on the StarCraft screen!

Ubuntu Example

You can edit/modify build your own bot out of this template. You'll probably also want to create a little script that executes building and running the jar & chaoslauncher via wine to make everything a little easier

I hope this tutorial was helpful and have fun creating your own bot on Mac or Linux!

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