Starcraft AI blog

Dave Churchill is feeding his students Starcraft as educational food. And he is coming out with new software to make it even tastier.

True to his tradition of naming projects with puns on “Starcraft”, he created a minimal starter bot named STARTcraft. It’s in C++ for Windows; he promises a Linux version later. Its selling point is that it is extremely quick and easy to set up and start coding. Installing Visual Studio 2019 is the slowest part, and after that it should take only minutes to get the bot running: Download the repo, unpack Starcraft from a provided link, open a VS project to code, or run a batch file to launch Starcraft and the bot. A couple of long videos (2 hours each), linked right in front on github, go over Starcraft AI in general, and over STARTcraft and BWAPI programming in particular.

Lately, I have the impression that most new bot authors want to start from scratch and create a bot that is entirely their own. It looks to me like STARTcraft is ideal for that. When you run it, it sends its workers to mine minerals, builds supply when necessary—and that’s all. Well, it also does a little debug drawing on the screen, and some basic map analysis on startup, and keeps track of when each map tile was last seen. There are a small number of utility functions in MapTools and Tools. It is basically just enough to show that the bot is working and give small examples of how to do things. In fact, the few things it does, it does in a simple way rather than an excellent way. If you end up creating a strong bot, you will have rewritten the existing behaviors. It will be all yours.

I’m an old-timer, so I may not be the best at judging what’s good for a beginner. In the past I have recommended starting with an open source bot that is already capable and full of features, but today capable bots are complex and may be intimidating to start with. STARTcraft is simple. With the videos as documentation and the code as examples, and with a working starting point, it is almost as easy as it can be, and yet leaves nearly everything to you. Even if you have unique ideas about architecture, the bot is small and you can refactor it into the shape you like. Recommended.