Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - jlund3

Pages: 1 [2] 3
16
Design / Re: 7DRL Idea - Plugin AI
« on: March 13, 2014, 07:01:07 PM »
My wife was freaked out enough by the yelling and pounding on the door that once dressed she allowed him to entry so I don't think there was technically any trespassing - just violations of peace and privacy. Furthermore, our state law says that while owners are required to give 24 hours notice prior to entry, failure to comply with these requirements cannot give rise to cause of action. However, we are out of the contract and he owes us prepaid rent and deposits. By our state law he has 30 days, but by our contract actually modifies this to be two weeks. I suspect he will try to keep at least part of our deposit and he doesn't seem to think he needs to prorate the refund on prepaid rent (he does), so I guess I can look forward to small claims court. He'll also be receiving a visit from the city soon since we've now learned that his accessory apartment violates local zoning ordinance. On a happier note, our new place is way nicer, actually meets all zoning and code requirements, and is owned by a local real estate agent who comes with glowing reviews from the community.

17
Design / Re: 7DRL Idea - Plugin AI
« on: March 13, 2014, 03:41:36 PM »
So the day after I made the post committing to do this 7DRL, my landlord decided that the law doesn't apply to him and he can enter our apartment at any time during the day with or without notice. One of the four times he showed up demanding immediate entry my wife was in the shower, and he still doesn't see any problem with his behavior. So we're moving. We found a new place in record time and have been moving stuff over. This means that it is already Thursday and I have spent a little less than an hour working on this project. I am preemptively calling this one a failure. That said, I'm gonna commit to finishing this project sometime after moving since I think it is a cool idea.

18
Design / Re: 7DRL Idea - Plugin AI
« on: March 05, 2014, 06:20:26 PM »
About the architecture, I think doing plain text communication might be a lot of work, because you have serialize the game state, which can be pretty complex in a RL. And then every AI developer would have to work on parsing it. Instead, why not just enforce a language, like Lua or Python? AI code is usually fairly compact anyway, so I doubt anyone would mind.

That is a fair point. Using a text-based protocol does add a bit of overhead to the system both in terms of serialization and in parsing. I personally don't think that serialization is too big of a deal. The code writing a map to string will be very similar to the code I use to write the map to the screen in my pre-existing terminal rendering code. As for parsing, I would anticipate providing a few basic starter AI's which already include parsing. I will only commit to Python for the 7DRL, but hopefully reading a simple text-based protocol into a more meaningful data structure isn't too hard of a challenge.

I have participated in a few AI contest in the past which used plain text communication. The advantage is that the AI can be written in any language. Hopefully, this means you'll have a larger pool of people who might want to participate. Furthermore, the very first things you learn to do in a new language is to read and write from stdin and stdout and I like the idea of lowering the barrier to entry as much as possible.

The more important disadvantage to a text protocol is that the game must be very simple by roguelike standards. However, I think this is actually okay. If the game is too complex, then any AI techniques which come out of this project will likely be too specific to this game to be useful elsewhere. I am thinking of a combat system which relies on a very small number of integer stats, and is complete deterministic.

For the curious, here is what I am thinking in terms of design: https://github.com/jlund3/airl/wiki/Design. Suggestions are welcome.

19
Design / Re: 7DRL Idea - Plugin AI
« on: March 05, 2014, 12:41:20 AM »
Probably a hard sell. People like to make their own 7DRLs, know what I mean?

I figured that this would be the case for most folks on these forums, and rightly so. However, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few folks out there who won't have the time or energy for a full game, but would welcome a project with a low barrier to entry for contributing. In any case, I think I've manage to sell myself on the idea, so even if no one else is interested, I'm gonna give it a shot. I'll post links to a github project as I figure out the game mechanics and AI protocols.

20
Design / 7DRL Idea - Plugin AI
« on: March 04, 2014, 09:01:40 PM »
Every so often someone proposes the idea of an AI which is trained with a genetic algorithm (GA), often with some sort of artificial neural network (ANN). There are a myriad of other ideas for AI that are also worth checking out. I personally do not think the GA/ANN idea sounds very robust in general (compared to a good developer designed AI that is), but would be an interesting experiment which you could then point to whenever someone proposes the idea again.

To facilitate AI experimentation, my idea for the upcoming 7DRL challenge is to implement a bare-bones roguelike with the AI run as a separate executable plugin. There would be a simple text-based protocol run similar to how many AI contest are run. As an example of what I mean, see http://ants.aichallenge.org/specification.php (not that this is a great example, its just one that came to mind first). Basically the game would run the AI as a subprocess and send and receive information via the AI stdin/stdout. Hopefully such a protocol combined with a simple roguelike  game would mean that the barrier to entry in writing the AI would be fairly low. You could also make the hero AI a plugin so that training is more easily accomplished.

My hope is that such a 7DRL would be interesting to other devs as a playground for AI experiments. My question is whether or not there would be interest from other developers in contributing AI plugins during the 7DRL challenge. If so, I would love to try this idea out. If not...well I've got a long list of more interesting game ideas I could do.

21
Design / Re: Super Hero RL - Design Fail?
« on: January 14, 2014, 03:17:43 AM »
Has anyone started something like this? I've been looking for a small project to polish up my own roguelike framework and this seems like a fun project for it.

Even if someone else has started it, I would say that you should go for it. Statistically speaking, the chances of both you and the hypothetical competing developer both finishing such a game is pretty slim. Furthermore, the chances that both games are even remotely similar beyond the common thematic elements is pretty slim. So have fun and happy coding!

22
Programming / Re: Procedural content generation and unit testing
« on: November 07, 2013, 05:11:39 PM »
Personally, I think your method of testing is fine. I have a suite of tests which I use to ensure that maps are fully connected, have the proper ratio of floor to wall, have roughly the correct features, etc. Were it up to me, I would just run the tests with a random seed, rather than a preset. This over time as I run the test thousands upon thousands of times, each run with a different seed, I can become more and more certain that the code does what I expect it to (this is called amplification of stochastic advantage). Furthermore, I would record the state of the rng at the start of each test so that if a test happens to fail, I can replicate the failure case, and figure out why after thousands of successful runs, I finally found the odd corner case in my generation algorithm.

As far as your question about whether using seeds in the range [0, 999] is okay, the answer is almost certainly. To illustrate, lets suppose you and a crappy rng with a really small state space, say in the range [0,9]. If we seed it with a 0, we might generate the sequence (and I'm just picking this out of the air) <0,2,6,5,3,1,7,8,4,9>. Once we reach the end of that sequence, it would start over at 0. Now suppose we seeded with a 1. With our hypothetical rng, we would get the sequence <1,7,8,4,9,0,2,6,5,3>. With this small of a state space, it is easy to see where the second sequence matches the first. However, your mersenne twister has an extremely large state space. For example, the most common implementation of the twister (MT19937) has a state space of 2^19937 - 1, which is roughly 4.3x10^66207. Note that the number of atoms in the observable universe is estimated at around 10^80. In other words, you are almost certainly fine using sequential seeds. The only question remaining is whether you want to trust your non-deterministic tests to just 1000 pre-set cases, or if you would rather be able to have increasing confidence over time as you run on more and more test cases.

23
Programming / Re: Unique PC race abilities?
« on: May 21, 2013, 04:29:04 PM »
I really like the idea of a game centered around unique abilities like this. I agree with the other responses: your dryad idea sounds cool.

My first thoughts of how to come up with these abilities was to seek inspiration from monster abilities in other roguelikes. For example, you could borrow the ice monster from the original rogue. He can freeze his opponents, leaving them vulnerable to his allies. I could imagine a nymph/leprechaun of some sort, which just helps you get more items/gold.

Another thought I had was a race which can absorb/steal/transfer abilities. This would potentially allow the party to adapt in situations where the chosen set of abilities is inadequate, but might also lead to severe inbalances...

24
Programming / Re: More Free Tiles!
« on: May 10, 2013, 02:29:31 PM »
These tiles are awesome. Keep up the great work!

25
Programming / Re: Most popular IDE and curses library?
« on: April 18, 2013, 06:47:50 PM »
Vim + Unix toolchain anyone?

26
Programming / Re: Name Generator
« on: March 08, 2013, 08:28:35 PM »
I've just implemented the algorithm by JLund3 from the RogueBasin wiki, using a "higher order
markov process and a simplified Katz back-off scheme".  It lets you fine tune the randomness pretty well and is supposedly better when you have a very small sample of data.

Looks great. I'm glad somebody got some use out of that code!
-jlund3

27
Challenges / Re: Early 7DRL Declaration
« on: January 30, 2013, 04:35:29 PM »
I've been toying around with the idea of using the concept of weeping angels from doctor who for a 7DRL. Players and angels would have directional field of view, similar to the heroes in Darren Grey's Gruesome. If an angel is in anyone's line of sight (including other angels), it cannot move. Otherwise, it can move very quickly (2 or 3 tiles per turn). In order to aid the player, the maps will have mirrors (perhaps even mirrors who's orientation can be adjusted). Note that the field of view will have to be a simplified 2D ray tracing algorithm to accommodate the mirrors. Given time (in other words, probably not), you could add in more tactical depth by allowing the player to sprint for short distances, or allowing angels to close their eyes (no cheating AI though).

28
Early Dev / Re: Ruin
« on: January 30, 2013, 12:43:58 AM »
 Will there be a windows release? I like the looks of this.

I just barely added in the ability to use Pygame (a Python layer on SDL) to render. Provided you have Python 2.7 and Pygame installed, you'll be able to run on Windows. Both are very easy to install. Practially everyone else has the option of running with pure Python and an ANSI capable terminal, or they can use the Pygame option.

29
Early Dev / Re: Ruin
« on: January 29, 2013, 01:15:15 AM »
  Do you mean from Darren on Roguelike Radio? Ha. I heard that as well.

  I say just do what you feel is right. No one is really going to judge you. I think Darren was exaggerating. Right?

Lol I was referring to Darren. If you look at how much I have written on the blog, clearly I meant for others to be able to give me feedback. His comments were just the last straw to get me to post about the blog :)

30
Early Dev / Ruin
« on: January 28, 2013, 07:35:36 PM »
I've recently (as in about two weeks ago) started working on a new roguelike project in secret. After hearing some negative reaction to Sil's roughly 8 years of more or less hidden development I've decided to (lightly) publicize what I've been up to. In that spirit, feel free to check out my dev blog and/or google code repo for Ruin. Any feedback or comments are much appreciated!

Blog: http://ruinrl.blogspot.com/
Code: http://code.google.com/p/ruinrl/


Pages: 1 [2] 3