Starcraft AI blog

Steamhammer inherits UAlbertaBot’s architecture: It is a collection of singletons which communicate by directly calling each other. Each provides a method Instance() which defines its instance as a static and returns a reference. It’s a standard C++ trick. The cross-calls look like this:

    return BuildingManager::Instance().isBeingBuilt(unitType);

It works, but I find it wordy and ugly. It repeats implementation details that are irrelevant to the caller. I plan to change the syntax to this:

    return the.building.isBeingBuilt(unitType);

With a local instance variable the, a reference to the The singleton which will centralize access to the other singletons. So far I have done this only for the newly-written MapPartition class which does connectivity analysis. It was a test to make sure I could see in the dark, because of the C++ Needlessly Obscure Initialization Rules (NOIR).

The code changes are not too much, and when I feel less time pressure I intend to implement the idea throughout. I think it’s an improvement. More concise and readable code will make the codebase more fun to work with.