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when to switch to BWAPI 4.2.0?

BWAPI 4.2.0 was released on 28 April. I have been thinking about when I want to switch over to it, and I haven’t decided.

Sooner? 4.2.0 fixes the zerg hive research bug, which pinches zerg strategy. The hive bug is nasty, so that counts for a lot. Code changes to switch to 4.2.0 seem minimal; I would want to revise the bits of the zerg strategy boss which encode the buggy tech tree. Dave Churchill has already switched UAlbertaBot over, so any problems should be minor. 4.2.0 supports Visual Studio 2017, so people wouldn’t suffer from old development tools. And of course there are various other improvements and fixes, and it’s common sense to stay as up to date as possible.

Later? Will competitions support 4.2.0? I wrote to the CIG 2017 competition organizers to see whether it would be supported in their tournament. The lead time may be short for them. We’ll see what they say. Also, given my development plans (fix bugs, work on mutalisks and opponent modeling), switching libraries would be overhead that slows me down for the moment. I’m not looking forward to switching to a new toolset when I’m still getting used to the one I’m using.

What do you think? Anybody have thoughts or experience?

Update: As Ailien points out in a comment, if you use BWTA you have to update it at the same time, and no new BWTA release is out yet. All DLLs have to be compiled with the same toolchain, per Microsoft. It may work if you compile BWTA yourself from source with vs2017 (no promises, I haven’t tried it). For BWEM, Igor Dimitrijevic suggests integrating it into your source code directly. If you did that, then it presumably does not have the same issue (I didn’t see any map-related changes in the BWAPI change list).

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MicroDK on :

I suspect there will also be some overhead work involved in switching to VS 2017?

Jay Scott on :

Yes, I expect that switching to vs2017 will take more effort than updating the code.

MicroDK on :

There are a lot if zerg bugfixes that could nice to have and ensure a smoother strategy code so it is very tenpt

MicroDk on :

tempting. But there will be work required to upgrade to VS 2017 and I am reluctant to change a working development environment. I think I will wait as I have higher priorities regatd

Ailien on :

Well, it's not as easy as you think. The problem is that bwta is not compatible with Bwapi 4.2.0. So you would also have to wait for an update of that one. Dave Churchill made the transition but he has written his own replacement for bwta.
I'm left in a silly place. I have basically updated Ailien to Bwapi 4.2.0 but cannot quite finish it because of that but I also don't want to go back. Because I've done all the work to upgrade to VS 2017 already.

Jay Scott on :

Ohhhh! I didn’t think of that at all, and I really should have! That must be why Dave Churchill removed the BWTA dependency so hurriedly from UAlbertaBot, without quite smoothing out all the rough spots.

MicroDK on :

Just as I thought... a lot of work just for the sake of "upgrading" to VS2017. Not something I will spend my time on. I will rather like to have a stable development environment as I have now. ;)

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