irregular rants and mind-farts
As someone which a strong interest (and little experience) in artificial intelligence I have a short and to the point request for online game developers: allow bots. Either have specific servers or, if you're single sharded, places in your game universe where bots are allowed. Outside of those servers and places continue your battle against illegal macroing, gold farming and botting: In the…
This is probably stupid, but… I start my EC2 instance only when I need it but a while ago it was needed pretty often and figuring out the IP every time I wanted to SSH to the machine got annoying quickly. Using the Dropbox Uploader bash script it was easy to set up a poor man's DNS since Amazon provides a way to figure out the public IP of an EC2 instance . So by doing: curl -s…
(see the end of this post for remarks I've gotten about the vbox image) So, the next Google AI Challenge seems to be almost ready to get going , albeit six months later than I expected. As blogged about earlier this year I have been worked on the Common Lisp starter bot for the challenge, an alternative starter bot with a proxybot, some YouTube videos and now a VirtualBox image with an Emacs+Slime…
(I'm putting this out here since Google queries for this situation didn't turn up anything useful for me.) Last night I had to add some text ± 5000 PNG files and I knew about Zach Beane's ZPNG package for reading PNGs but I didn't know of a package that would read them. A quicklisp:system-apropos turned up png-read written by Ramarren which looked simple enough to use so I went with that. After…
Update: he linked me to this restatement on #lisp: http://cryptome.org/0005/dod-lisp-sol.htm Does anyone know what has happened to David O'Toole? He hasn't been heard of since a last curious post to the lisp-games-dev mailing list: http://lists.common-lisp.net/pipermail/lisp-game-dev/2011-July/000158.html (read the whole thread) His website, blog, twitter and github have all been either removed or…
I have made two screencasts showing the setup and usage of the proxy bot for the upcoming Google AI Challenge. This was at the request of McLeopold . For the Planet Wars challenge I've tried to explain the use case for a proxy bot on the forums. Please read that post if you have no idea what the proxy bot does, although I will try to sum it up now: the proxy bot allows one to develop your actual…
Okra (Common Lisp bindings for the Ogre3D engine) hasn't seen a lot of work lately. It covers my current needs and I've mostly been off to other projects. However, there's good news from the Ogre camp: there's now a community effort to create a C API ! I can only hope the API will have settled down before I return to using Ogre.
Work is in progress for the next Google AI Challenge and I've been working on the Common Lisp starter package. At the request of the organizers the starter package has been made very basic. A more extensive starter package with proxy-bot functionality is available at: http://github.com/aerique/google-ai-challenge-2011-1-ants/ . Proxy-bot functionality is meant to allow for more Lisp-like…
Table of Contents 1 Introduction 1.1 Toy Project 1.2 Environment 2 Generating Random Code 2.1 Operators 2.2 RANDOM-ELT 2.3 Generating Random Function Forms 2.3.1 Limiting RANDOM-FORM 2.4 =INPUT= 2.5 Testing RANDOM-ELT and RANDOM-FORM 3 Running Generated Code 3.1 SBCL note 4 Population 5 Fitness 6 Generation Functions 6.1 Traversing Nodes 6.1.1 N-NODES 6.1.2 Picking Random Nodes 6.1.3 Replacing…
The Planet Wars competition has been running for a month now and the deadline for submissions is Saturday the 27th of November 2010. Don't let the fact that it has already been running for a month dissuade you from participating. If you're an experienced programmer a weekend of solid work will get your bot in the top 500 (out of a little more than 3000 participants currently) and maybe even in the…
It took a while but Common Lisp is finally supported on the official Planets Wars game server (Google AI Challenge)! (In the meantime one could use dhartmei's server (and you still can since it offers some advantages like more games in a shorter time).) Both Gábor Melis and I updated our starter packages which can be found here:…
The Google AI Challenge should start any day now and I and "anwyn" have both made Common Lisp starter packages . anwyn's follows the API of the other starter packages more and is perhaps a little more lispier (I like LOOP a lot) and mine's a little more bare-bones: just the basic communication with the game server and a silly example and you have to do the rest. One little extra in my starter…
There's a new Google AI Challenge: Planet Wars . It seems they're also working on adding support for Common Lisp due to the number of people that used it in the last challenge. Awesome!
Progress I have made very little progress since the last report, mainly due to the little time that was available to me. Only two things were done: The source code was cleaned up a little. A windows binary was made (OpenGL only). In the short term I will not work on ETOTP anymore but perhaps for ILGE 2011 or another challenge or expo I'll continue where I left off. What Went Right Making wrapper…
1 Progress Since the last report I've added: a controllable spaceship, bullets, tentacles and I made an unsuccessful attempt at producing a Linux binary. For the controls I use the OIS library. I was already familiar with this due to my clois-lane library. The controls work but don't feel quite right yet and need some minor adjustments. Adding bullets was straightforward. The most time was put…
Introduction I've finally managed to scramble together a good couple of hours to work on my ILGE 2010 entry. At this rate it will be doubtful whether I'll have a minimal game by the end of this month :-( The first item that can be checked off the to-do list: rolling terrain. The video is low quality and stutters but this is due to me using sub-optimal software to capture my desktop. The program…
cl2md is a quick hack inspired by pbook.el (which you should check out if you've never heard of it and are an Emacs user since it marks up the source code much nicer). The page "cl2md" in the previous paragraph links to is the actual source code file which has been run through itself and a Markdown converter.
Sorry for the CamelCase but I didn't come up with the names :-) For those bitten by the game AI bug since the Google AI Challenge (all eleven of us) I've started working on a Common Lisp (CL) client for the StarCraft ProxyBot with the StarCraft AI competition in mind: http://github.com/aerique/cl-starcraft-proxybot . The project is still in its early stages but the important groundwork is done:…
They've finally added Common Lisp as a supported language to the Google AI Challenge. (Just before they stopped adding new languages, phew!) There were some issues getting my starter pack to work on their server since they're running an older SBCL (1.0.18 on Debian) and that didn't support the "--script" switch. That combined with them being very busy meant it took a while. We were passing error…
For those who've missed it: Google AI Challenge 2010 There's no Common Lisp starter pack (edit: since this is getting misinterpreted I meant a CL starter pack for the AI Challenge) but after a particular nasty adventure spelunking for days through an archaic database at work, fighting through the 20 years of cruft that has been build up inside of it and finally finding and fixing the problem I…
I've uploaded one-and-a-half project to GitHub that may or may not be useful to other people: Black Tie packages the noise functions that were previously in Okra as a seperate library. It is not very extensive yet and has only been optimized for SBCL. At the moment it includes functions for generating Perlin noise, simplex noise and Voronoi diagrams. Clysma is a toy project that at the moment…
Vroeger trad er nog wel eens een minister af als deze over de scheef was gegaan, maar tegenwoordig trekken ze een Rita Verdonk-hoofd, doen alsof feiten meningen zijn, zeggen dat ze tóch gelijk hebben en gaan gewoon lekker verder.
I was installing Debian (testing release) on a netbook since my main laptop is away for repairs and I noticed the Ogre packages in the distribution. So far I have always compiled Ogre and its dependencies myself so I was curious how much work it would take to get the Okra examples running. Not much work, but you do need to pull the latest master branch from GitHub since I had to make a few…
Thanks to CL-GTK2 's author Dmitry Kalyanov for his help and patience and also thanks to several #lisp residents for testing some of my builds. Go to http://www.aerique.net/software/okra-gtk-demo/ for the downloads. This post should be treated more as a work-in-progress report 1 than as the blog I hoped I could publish, which would have had a title like: "Easy cross-platform executable delivery…
Torchlight has been released by Runic Games . It's is a hack & slash game in the grand tradition of Rogue, Diablo and Diablo 2. Key people that worked on the last two titles have also worked on Torchlight. The reason I blog about this is because it uses Ogre for its graphics engine which is the same library Okra uses. I played it for a couple hours last night and it is really enjoyable. So go…