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freshening the map pool

Yesterday’s brief post about the exotic island map Sparkle unexpectedly connected with a past and continuing discussion about maps. I’ve written about map choice before: See choosing tournament maps, and also tournament map selection as a prod.

One widespread opinion, and I agree, is that a new map should not break old bots, but should provide opportunities to new bots. Existing bots that have not been updated in a long time should be able to play on the map with their usual skill. Bots that understand the special features of the map should be able to exploit them to gain an advantage. For example, pure island maps break old bots, but a regular map with some island bases is playable for all bots and provides an exploitable map feature (and we already have some maps with islands). Maps with map blocks that disrupt pathing also break many old bots, but map blocks designed to allow smooth pathing outside the blocked regions provide an exploitable map feature. The map Fortress used in AIIDE is an example, with blocked off corner bases. There are many other examples of maps with exploitable features.

Lately, I’ve been feeling that the SSCAIT maps are becoming stale. They are fine in themselves, but I’m tired of them staying the same. The advantages of maps that stay the same for years are that old bots continue to work as well as ever, and you can compare over time. The disadvantages are that new challenges are lacking, and that it can get boring. Fun is a critical mission requirement, if you don’t mind me putting it that way. And the April Fool prank of playing on Big Game Hunters for a day doesn’t quite fulfill it.

SSCAIT has an official map pack with 15 maps, and uses 14 of them. Electric Circuit is included but disabled, because its blocked paths cause a lot of bots to mess up (Steamhammer included, by the way). One idea to provide variety without breaking continuity is to keep using the familiar 14 official maps and add one more map that changes periodically, perhaps the Map of the Month. That fills out the map pool to the full 15 and provides a small touch of variety and new challenges, but not so much that bot authors are forced into extra effort to keep up. That idea seems to me like a good compromise. Of course other ideas are good too; maybe commenters will suggest some.

Of course it’s easy for me to suggest. I don’t do any of the work of running the service! Kudos to those who do, and I hope they can find time to realize map variety in some form.

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krasi0 on :

We should not forget the other disadvantage of adding new maps to the SSCAIT pool. Those maps need to be analyzed offline by *ALL* bots that use some slow time analysis library like a variation of BWTA. Then the cached files need to be uploaded into the right place on the server. All of this adds additional overhead to administering the whole service and is generally a hassle.

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