The Applied Games Group Blog : Xbox 360

Silicon Minds Challenge (+ submission sample)

apg — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 22:47:00 GMT

On the 8th December 2007 the Silicon Minds challenge was launched at the Machine Learning and Games workshop of the NIPS conference in the picturesque Canadian ski resort of Whistler.

The challenge is to push the limits of Artificial Intelligence while building a game with XNA Game Studio 2.0.
The main prize an opportunity to interview for an internship with Microsoft Research Cambridge, Rare Ltd or Lionhead Studios.
The submission entry period lasts until the 27th January 2008.
Full details of the competition are available at the DreamBuildPlay website: http://www.dreambuildplay.com

The contest is to be judged on 3 criteria:

Game A.I. (60%) – Game A.I. will be evaluated based on how it serves the game design, and how it contributes to the game experience. Novelty and originality of the AI is appreciated but not required: a novel use of an existing state-of-the AI method is in itself considered to be innovative. General applicability of the AI concepts/techniques is also valued.
Fun Factor (20%) – The fun factor will be evaluated based on how the game design creates a positive user experience. This may include how intellectually challenging, relaxing, stimulating or satisfying the game is. A key indicator for the fun factor will be the desire to keep playing.
Production Quality (20%) – Make your game world as polished as possible and hook your judges with exciting, entertaining action. Production quality will be evaluated based on how seamless the overall game play is, the quality of the assets used, and the structure, readability and level of documentation of the code.

The submission must include the following:

Your finished game in .ccgame XNA Creators Club Game Package form.
The source code and content of your game.
A design summary.
Three screenshots of your finished game.

To this end over the last week we have been having fun creating a mini-sample submission attached based on the board game Go demonstrating:

Using Monte Carlo methods to score the board - thanks to David Stern.
Some well documented source - thanks to Ralf Herbrich.
A sample design summary - thanks to Thore Graepel.
Reused code and graphics - thanks to the XNA Minjie board game sample.

Disclaimer: The mini-game sample itself actually uses a rule based AI and should not be seen as an example of AI or game quality - more a sample of documentation quality and the submission files required.

What we do hope is that you will find the sample a useful reference on how to document your code (specifically the XGoLibrary project), how to comment code you have taken from other sources and how to write the design summary.

On coding standards, if you are starting afresh for the competition we suggest you take a look at the MSDN section ".Net Framework General Reference - Design Guidelines for Class Library Developers" for guidance. In summary this is what we would like to see in the code:

Readability chosen over raw performance.
Short understandable classes and functions.
A consistent naming convention.
Good C# XML comments.

Don't forget though 60% of the score is based on Game AI... hope you enjoy the contest - we are really looking forward to seeing your submitted games.

Last but not least a quick special thanks to Joaquin Quiñonero Candela for working so hard organising the challenge.

Update 1: We have noticed that the PDF still had some review comments; they are removed now. Also, rendering during the scoring was accidently reset to constant black (rather than an alpha value proportional to the expected propability of the territory outcome). Finally, we slightly refined the passing algorithm of the AI: If the human player passes then the AI uses the Monte Carlo scorer to estimate whether or not each piece is already determined in colour up to a probability of at least 80%. If so, the AI passes already.

Update 2: We have noticed a couple of further bugs and easy improvements that can be made: The rule-based AI would start to fill in own eyes if the eye is either on the side of the board or in one of the four corners. This was not intended and has been fixe now. Also, the Monte Carlo sampling can be sped up significantly by only checking for move validity and "eye-ness" after a random move from the list of empty vertices has been determined. Checking a vertex for being empty is a lot faster than checking if a move is valid on that vertex.

Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP) 2007

apg — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:09:00 GMT

At the beginning of this month (October) I attended and presented at the CUFP event in Freiburg, Germany. The talk was on some of the work our group has been doing over the last year using F# including the XBox 360 title Halo 3 and on predicting ad clicks for Windows Live. The slides (thanks Ralf) are now available online and for those who couldn't make it videos of all the talks are expected soon. There were plenty of interesting talks throughout the day, including Chris Waterson of Liveops "... using continuation passing monads to encapsulate computation state and hide the complexity of the non-blocking I/O layer" with OCaml, which seemed to be in a similar direction to F# asynchronous workflows. The day ended with a discussion led by Don Syme on the subject of hiring functional programmers; where it emerged that the remaining attendees were actively seeking over 40 new hires. Finally it was time to enjoy the remainder of a hot sunny day and some quality German beer.

Phil

Composing a video game in F#

apg — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:33:00 GMT

This week it was my opportunity to present a topic for 15 minutes at the MLP group's ritual Tuesday afternoon tea and cakes session (yes - we are based in the UK). I thought it might be fun to knock up a little game with the Microsoft functional programming language F#. With only a few hours to spare at the weekend I decided to go with a retro style game and an old favourite of mine - the light cycle game sequence featured in the 80s movie Tron. So after about 4 hours I had a 2 player game in Windows Forms with optional support for XBox 360 controllers with managed DirectX all in under 200 lines of F#; and come tea time I even had some players. If you fancy having a go yourself the code can be viewed on the F# Wiki.

Have fun,

Phil

First Halo 3 Multiplayer Details Emerge!

apg — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 21:51:00 GMT

I am a big fan of Halo and Halo 2 so I was very pleased to see several gaming pages starting to report details of the Halo 3 multiplayer (originally printed in a Swedish gaming magazine). The "man-cannon" and the "Moongoose" sound like amazing fun! And, the Assault Rifle of Halo CE seems to be back: Hoorahh!

Well, it will still be some time until the game is released so in the meantime I will go back to play Splinter Cell: Double Agent. I am a fan of this series since its first incarnation and have played the story of every title (Splinter Cell 1/Pandorra Tomorrow/Chaos Theory) - I just finished the Shanghai level on Double Agent. I really like the "NSA/JBA trust bars" and think that it adds a great deal of "non"-linearity to the gameplay (at least for me). However, on the multiplayer side, I am disappointed to see SC:DA using an experienced based ranking system rather than TrueSkill. Well, I will give it a shot tonight and report on my findings.

Ralf Herbrich

Meeting the Press: Gaming with Katie Ledger and Steve Clayton

apg — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:01:00 GMT

Yesterday, we had some prominent visitors: Katie Ledger and Steve Clayton of PTS-TV. PTS-TV is a UK project to connect with the tens of thousands of Microsoft Partners in a new way (inspired by Channel 9).

Katie and Steve interviewed both Thore and me about our work on TrueSkill for almost an hour - in the end, we even got to play a race of PGR 3 and one Slayer match of Halo 2 against each other!* Everything has been captured on video and I hope not all of this action falls victim to the eventual cutting** - Thore really showed off his amazing skill with the Plasma Pistol/Battle Rifle combination (also known as the "Noob combo") and I scored a memorable hit with the Sniper Rifle.

It was a shame that we could not get Xbox Live to work in order to demonstrate TrueSkill "in action" - we had just returned from Redmond on Saturday and completely forgot to reset the network settings of our Xbox 360 (and being filmed while trying to reset the network connections does not really help to remember).

Nevertheless, we had a really great and enjoyable time with both of them - and by the look of it, they enjoyed the time as well.

Ralf Herbrich

*The race was in Tokyo, 1 lap which I won by comfortable 11 seconds. The shoot-out was 8 minutes or first to 15 kills on Lockout - Thore won this one with a comfortable lead.

**I do hope that Steve cuts out "why" we like to play competitively on Xbox Live - if not, I am in trouble ...