Starcraft AI blog

As a teaser, here is a code snippet from the Steamhammer 3.0 development version.

void SkillKit::update()
{
    for (Skill * skill : skills)
    {
        if (skill->nextUpdate() <= the.now())
        {
            skill->update();
            if (skill->feasible() && skill->good())
            {
                skill->execute();
            }
        }
    }
}

(the.now() is short for BWAPI::Broodwar->getFrameCount(), the current frame number.)

The skill kit doesn’t actually add skills as such, it adds control of skills; to “execute” a skill means to set flags or post goals or otherwise send orders to the rest of the program to carry out the skill as directed. The skill controller can run every frame if it likes and change its orders at any time. There are two main features. 1. The skill kit is extensible: It is easy to write your own skill controllers as subclasses of Skill and drop them in. This is good for modularity and especially good for people who fork Steamhammer. 2. The skill kit provides an easy interface to the persistent opponent model files. A Skill can include one method to write its data to a string, and one method to parse a string that it wrote back into data, and the skill kit takes care of the I/O plumbing.

As I use the skill kit for more things, Steamhammer will become much more flexible in adapting to its opponents.

Soon: Tournament design is hard.