Monday, July 20, 2009

Capture the Flag II

I've finished the first programming run for "capture the flag." Right now two teams compete eternally and a counter keeps score of who wins more often.

The field itself consists of four regions:
1. The flag zone: The defending team can't go into it's own flag zone, and is a safe haven for an attacking player.
2. The defending zone: The defender and rescuers hang out here. When the enemy attacker is not in this zone, they just track his y-position, when he is, they go after him.
3. The attacking zone: Here, the attacker forms a vector which is the sum of vectors towards the flag, with vectors away from the defender and attacker, with given weights attached to each.
4. The safe zone: In the safe zone, the defender can not capture the attacker, so the attacker no longer tries to avoid anyone and goes straight for the flag. Once he has it, he makes a dash for it to his own zone.

As of now, the rescuer does absolutely nothing - he has the same instructions as the defender, except he isn't allowed to capture. Instead, when an attacker is captured, he has to do a strange sort of dance: first he has to go to the corner of his own zone, then he has to touch his own flag-holder, and then he starts again.

The system often gets into a "deadlock scenario" in which both players eternally get captured, do their dance, and get captured at the exact same place. This problem could be avoided by imposing a time limit on each round and resetting after it expires (the positions of the players are randomized at the start of each round.)

Here's a video of the program in action:



Before doing the really hard part - the genetic algorithm part, one more programming run is needed, to iron out the kinks. This means:
  1. Make the program more modular (i.e. variable number of players for each team)
  2. Make a jail (to give the rescuers something to do)
  3. Clean up the player logic (there's a lot of ad hoc stuff in there right now to make it work)
  4. Add timers etc. and pretty it up a little.
For now, the C# code and zipped Visual Studio C# project is located here!

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