Vindinium

Sun 28 September 2014 Free Time Algorithms / Java / Vindinium

What Is Vindinium?

Vindinium is an AI competition.  Its a game that is played exclusively by bots.  You could create a bot that takes input from a human player, but the required response time makes it impractical.  The game rules are fairly simple, which makes the barrier-of-entry fairly low.

What's the Rub?

The game's object model is not easy to deal with.  The entire map state is sent back to you each time, so its up to the client to determine which parts are mutable vs. immutable.  The map is represented as a string and an integer that tells you the length of one side of the map (all maps are square).  Without a good client, the bot has to manually parse the map string, build graphs to represent the map, etc.  This is work that shouldn't need to be repeated for each bot.

I Wrote a Simple Client

The keyword in the title is, "simple."  I wrote a client (posted on Github) that handles the HTTP and JSON bits using Google's HTTP client and GSON, respectively.  The game state passed to the Bot interface is just a Java representation of the GameState class.  Its as bare-bones as ones gets and it has the problems described in the previous paragraph.

My hope is to write a few more advanced clients.  One of the things I'd like to achieve is to have a game state that's much easier to deal with.  It'd be nice if the game map was presented to the bot as a graph along with a few hash maps to tell the bot where the taverns, players, and chests are.  Another thing I would like to handle is mutltithreading.  The client should respond with a default move should the bot be taking too long to calculate a move.  The bot should also be provided some background threads to do calculations, such as forecasting and pathfinding, while the other bots are moving.  Ideally, I'll add these things to my current project as additional options.

I Also Have a Working Bot

SimpleMurderBot (source) just runs to the nearest player and stabs them.  If it has money and is low on health, it'll run for beer.  Thats it...super simple.  I would like to write a bot with a more serious strategy, but for now, SimpleMurderBot is pretty fun to work on.

Hop In!

There are plenty of starter packs, and writing a client is fairly simple.  I'd really like to see this game catch on.