I was reading about Deepmind is collaborating with Blizzard, trying to build some reinforcement learning empowered artificial general intelligence bot. As being a Starcraft fan since 2000, it is a very exciting feeling to read about the progress that has been made along with some of the fancy Youtube videos out there.
There are most two topics around sc2 bot, one centered around building the robot, and the second is the environment, i,e, how to interact with the game and programmatically control the units within the game. I guess writing a bot for Starcraft is not new, the game comes with its own map editor and you can customize the map and write a bot. I clearly remembered that my childhood friends and I spent almost a summer beating 7 bots on the map – Big Hunter in Starcraft I and then level up, pursuing the challenge of finding different implementations of “advanced bots” and beat them (one of the implementations is double mineral and gas for your opponent, that was crazy). almost two decades have passed, I still do not know how to write a bot yet. I have seen some crazy logic using Galaxy and here is a great Youtube channel to show off the power.
Other than the map editor, Blizzard has also published a library for researchers and developers to interact with the game using generic programming language.
I came across two libraries that confused me a little bit, one is s2client-api and the other is s2client-proto. So here is the repo description for those two libraries.
s2client-api: StarCraft II Client – C++ library supported on Windows, Linux and Mac designed for building scripted bots and research using the SC2API.
s2client-proto: StarCraft II Client – protocol definitions used to communicate with StarCraft II.
Clearly, both those two libraries claim to be able to control the game via an API but s2client-proto was written mostly in Python while s2client-api in C++.
I have not yet looked into the Python solution yet merely because the name of the project s2client-api, it must be the official API, right? also, I usually have an assumption where if there is an equivalent of a functionality, one written in C++ and the other in Python, it is usually the later is a mere wrapper of the C++ solution, so I decided to first give s2client-api a try.
Other than you have to install lots of development tools if you are not an active C++ developer, like me, I have to install Cmake and latest Visual Studio 2017 community, which is actually pretty easy to do. The set up tutorial is pretty well written and easy to follow.
I was very excited to get the first tutorial up and running, seeing the SCVs started mining the minerals, .etc. The documentation is great and the three tutorials work right out of the box.
In the end, I have modified the code a little bit to implemented two logic:
- wait till you have 50 marines and then attack the enemy base
- instead of one barracks, build more
And here is the code snippet.
Last but not least, this is an exciting screenshot of how that simple logic on top of the tutorial3 killed my opponent.
GG
datafireball 