2006 ORTS RTS Game AI Competition

Welcome to the ORTS competition page. We are organizing an RTS game AI competition to be held prior to AIIDE 2006 in June 2006. On this page you can find descriptions of the game categories, the tournament rules, and a brief ORTS overview. We encourage students, AI researchers, and hobbyists interested in real-time strategy games to get familiar with the ORTS project and to participate in this challenging and fun event. Everybody is welcome - there is no entry fee and attending the conference is not required for participation.

News

29.June.2006: tournament entry source code available (see below)
26.June.2006: tournament report presented at AIIDE-2006 available (see below)
19.June.2006: tournament 3 finished. Congratulations UMich!
18.June.2006: tournament 2 finished, uofa2 only lost 10 matches in total out of 400! Congratulations to UMaas for getting into 2nd place and earning the money prize. tournament 3 started
17.June.2006: tournament 1 finished, congratulations to UMich! tournament 2 started ...
16.June.2006: the competition is on!
2.June.2006: status update
19.May.2006: more detailed mining action description for games 1 and 3.
13.May.2006: added a getting-started document.
11.May.2006: game updates: better scoring schemes, adjusted unit stats, updated time line
27.Apr.2006: updated competition computer specs: see below
14.Apr.2006: updated game rules and documentation.
9.Feb.2006: game2: bases are now placed symmetrically for improved fairness
3.Feb.2006: updated game descriptions, completed terrain generation code, added screenshots

(see also ORTS news here)

Competition Results

Just in time the tournament manager software has been finished. The competition games are played on 31 ugrad lab computers.

Tournament 1 started June 16. 225 single player games are played lasting 10 minutes each. Live tournament standings and the game result list are reported here and here.

At around 6:00am MDT the tournament manager exceeded its disk quota. To stay on track I had to reduce the number of matches. brzo1 was leading over uofa1 almost all the time. So, we happily concede 2nd place to it (*).

Final scores are as follows:
```
rank name       score      matches    ratio      errors    

1.   umich1     1458455.0  225        6482.02    0         
2.   brzo1      1136690.0  225        5051.96    38  (*)      
3.   uofa1      1136790.0  225        5052.4     43  (*)
4.   creed1     559380.0   225        2486.13    0         
```
Not considering the segfault games, ratios would be as follows:
```
umich1 6482.02
uofa1  6246.10
brzo1  6078.56
creed1 2486.13
```
Clearly, we should have had somebody debugging uofa1 in the last hour ;-)
Congratulations UMich!

tmanager output (~2MB)
server output (~2MB)
client output (~27MB)
replay files (~98MB)

Some of the replay files are broken due to exceeding a disk quota :-( For watching replay files run
```
tournament/game?_orts -loadreplay FILE -seed SEED -ids first,second
```
and -nfog for game 1 and 2. Then run tournament/game?_ortsg -id first and a dummy client for games 2 and 3 - say bin/orts -m client -id second.
Tournament 2 started June 17, 10:30 MDT. Live tournament standings and the game result list are reported here and here.
13:00 MDT: TROUBLE with umaas2 : it always crashes - stopped tournament, investigating right now ...
15:45 MDT: umaas2 fixed, tournament 2 restarted. 200 game pairs to go...
There is a tiebreaker scoring bug. uofa2 actually won all matches so far. I will correct all match results at the end of the tournament.

Update June 18 10:00 MDT: tournament 2 is finished. The final scores are as follows:
```
name       score      matches    ratio

uofa2      390.0      400        0.975      
umaas2     210.0      400        0.525               
umich2     0.0        400        0                   
```
tmanager output (~260KB)
server output (~2MB)
umaas2 output (~17MB)
uofa2 output (~9MB)
umich2 output (35KB)
replay file sample (~16MB)
all replay files (~155MB)
Tournament 3 started at 10:30 MDT on June 18. Live tournament standings and the game result list are reported here and here. Update June 19: 8:30 MDT: tournament 3 is finished. The final scores are as follows:
```
name       score      matches    ratio      errors    

uofa3      74.0       200        0.37       2         
umich3     124.0      200        0.62       2      
```
Congratulations UMich!

tmanager output (~300KB)
server output (~3MB)
uofa3 output (~2.5MB)
umich3 output (20KB)
replay file sample (~7MB)
all replay files (~61MB)

Tournament report presented at AIIDE-2006

Entry Source Code

uofa 1,2,3 + umaas2 (~53MB)
umich 1,2,3 (~267MB)
creed1 (~800KB)
brzo1 (~1MB)

Getting Started

Overview [PDF]
Download and Installation
ORTS client documentation you can find in orts3/misc/doc/client-code.
A Sample AI Client is provided in directory orts3/apps/sampleai.
Tournament related files are located in directory orts3/tournament

Status (2. June 2006)

Seven authors/groups have registered for the competition. We are currently setting up the tournament environment. The plan is to give each contestant access to an account on a UofA computer to install and test their software. Please take note that the tournament computers are not fast (AMD Athlon XP 1.5GHz with 512MB RAM running Linux kernel 2.4.31 and gcc 3.3.4). SDL and boost have been installed and the ORTS server compiles. The tournament director software assumes that tournament entries are called game1, game2, and game3 respectively. Furthermore, it is important that the programs recognize GameStateModule command line options - such as -host, -port, and -id - and that programs exit when a game is over or the connection to the server is broken. Please test your software extensively! More later ...

Time Line

Starting now: installing and testing ORTS software. We need feedback regarding the installation process and the functionality of the game scripts to rectify problems as early as possible. Please report issues in the ORTS help forum.
Entry registration deadline 1. June 2006. Send email to mburo (at) cs.ualberta.ca with the following information: name, affiliation, and game categories you want to participate in. We also need to know what software tools and components you need to have installed on Linux machines to run your code. See rules for details about software requirements.
Testing software installation (8-15. June 2006)
Running the tournament (16-18. June 2006)
Reporting the tournament results at AIIDE-06 (20-23. June 2006)

Tentative hardware/software available to each entry: AMD XP 1800+ 32 bit CPU at 1.54GHz, 512MB RAM, GNU/Linux 2.4.31, gcc 3.3.4

README : tournament directory files, ORTS overview
rules : tournament rules
game1 : describes game category 1 "gathering resources"
game2 : describes game category 2 "tank combat"
game3 : describes game category 3 "a real RTS game"

Some slides on RTS game AI research and the competition (for game details please read game1,game2,game3)

Initial proposal

If you have questions about the tournament please post them to the ORTS sourceforge help forum