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Steamhammer 1.2 to be followed by 1.2.1

Steamhammer 1.2 is taking longer than I expected. It may end up being a few days later than promised. It’s not as fun to work on protoss and terran, and I’ve been putting less effort in.

I have given it a workable set of a half-dozen protoss openings to play in a different mix versus each race. There are still a couple of critical bugs (why can’t it make a photon cannon?). The terran openings are giving me more trouble. UAlbertaBot turns out to be short of terran skills. It doesn’t know how to stim marines, so bio builds are weak, and it doesn’t know where to lay spider mines, so mech builds are weak. (There’s a routine to lay mines, but it is never called.) And I’m not excited about adding the skills. The terran openings will not keep up with the other races.

BOSS truly does work much better for protoss than for zerg. Steamhammer’s protoss play using BOSS with simple goals shows better macro than Steamhammer’s old BOSS versions did with carefully-chosen goals.

UAlbertaBot does include a protoss drop skill, which in a test almost worked. It built a shuttle and flew it in a cautious path along the edge of the map to the enemy base—all it forgot was to load zealots first. If I don’t run into any surprise trouble, I’ll get it working for protoss and terran and include a drop opening or two. With XelnagaII disabled, no bot currently plays dark templar drop, and that’s a shame.

Also, Steamhammer 1.1.1 is showing some severe bugs that sabotage its play, especially in long games. So before I get into the 1.3 series, I’m planning a bug fix version 1.2.1 that fixes the worst bugs and restores good macro in long games. That includes protoss and terran bugs that may come up in version 1.2.

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krasi0 on :

I have to disagree that it's not as fun to work on terran, although I agree with you when Protoss is concerned :) With Terran, it mostly boils down to: rather be careful now, than sorry later or perhaps that's my own bias. LOL

One of the more severe bugs that I've noticed in the SH version playing on SSCAIT (and IIRC you are already aware of it) is floating a huge amount of resources when a drone has trouble reaching an expansion location.

Jay Scott on :

I’ve identified 3 separate problems that cause expansions to fail and macro to go haywire. The bugs are making a coordinated attack!

MicroDK on :

Not just drones have trouble with pathfinding. I encountered other situations with Microwave (my SH 1.0 based bot). Zerglings run into dead ends and can not find a way back. Also if the bot has created a hidden hatchery, that is located in the opposite corner, drones transfering from one base to another run into dead ends. I encountered this on Benzene and Electric Circuit where there are blocking buildings several places. Really frustrating.

Jay Scott on :

It is frustrating. I will probably do something about blocking minerals in version 1.2.3 or so, but I plan to put off blocking buildings until later. That’s similar to AILien, which mines out blocking minerals but still suffers from blocking buildings. Some competitive maps have blocks that no current bot can cope with at all. Outsider has been played recently; it has mineral line blocks that you can push units through. For a more extreme example, see Plasma with its egg blocks that only workers can pass through.

MicroDK on :

BTW, do you have a list of bugs that you have fixed in the UAB code? I compared the SH 1.1.1 code and found the code that had been changed compared to SH 1.0, but it takes a long time if I am going to do this this for every version of SH. ;)

Jay Scott on :

Tracking upstream is a challenge no matter what. My impression is that most bot authors don’t bother. My development style includes straightening out stuff that I come across which seems untidy, going as far as fixing typos in the comments and adjusting spacing, so there are a lot of small changes. Significant changes are mentioned in the announcement post, but it doesn’t have details. I don’t have a better way to list all changes than to do a big diff. An advantage of my style is that code improves over time; a disadvantage is that I may introduce more bugs than I fix, and I definitely introduced some bad ones so don’t accept my changes uncritically. I will have the same problem wrt UAlbertabot when Dave Churchill pushes his changes.

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