genthaler/elm-grid-war

My homage to the hex-based strategy games of yesteryear

elm-grid-war

My homage to the hex-based strategy games of yesteryear

Feature categories

Game setup

• display a map with some terrain and characters
• map/game editor
• save & load game
  • plain text (JSON/Base64/Some other encoding)
  • localstorage
  • schema versioning
  • history? CRDT?

Game play

• implement battle in text
  • use basic colours to show statuses
  • need a console?
• move-based vs continuous play
• slow down game while typing?
• pause game?
• a character moving to a different location
• multiple characters moving
• two characters fighting
• keyboard controls
• show available moves
• show range of attack
• text-based input of commands
• move unit
• game selection page
• unit purchase/attribute page
• fog of war
• AI
  • strategies
  • automatic actions
  • map generation - terraform
  • path finding - A*
  • maybe use service worker to do game logic for AI?

Game experience

• look for a simple SVG example
• rotate map
• zoom into map
• progressive enhancement of SVG images
• scalable graphics
• smooth animations
• smooth gameplay
• audio
• elm-geometry
• elm-3d-camera

Help

• game play page
• give directions

Multiplayer

• Look for a platform for free games for gamestate, player registration and lookup
• serverless
• peer to peer play
  • probably still need a server for discovery
• server based?
• prove security properties
• vote to change game speed

Native

• Electron?
• React Native?
• Flux?
• Flutter?
• any new ones?

Tasks

• look up available free/pd/ccl graphics/sounds/models
• gif/svg/webgl/css
• Halt when there are no more members of a team
• Extract current AI as a module
• eExtract map generation as a module.
• Refine message passing? or use Debug.log? Currently using Result for message passing, not really working
• Start to refine the UI, use cell select to display statuses

AI

Types

• Completely random (current implementation)
• Drive in a (random) curvy line
• Drive in a straight line and bounce off the walls
• Neural Net
  • GAN
• Genetic Algorithms
• GA + NN
• Control Flow Theory / Feedback control
• swarming?
• Search (i.e. suck and see), prune, Minimax, AB-Pruning Minimax, and random agent
  • breadth-first
  • depth-first
  • would like to be able to keep relevant search results after a move

Considerations

• GANs and Genetic Algorithms need time to learn, can't really do it in-game
• need to be able to interrupt the search in order to pick the best in the available time, and also to permit animations.
• how to allow genetically generated code to be interruptible?
• can have GA for longer lasting games, with waves or constantly spawning
• although we can have a variant where there is no central intelligence, rather NPCs just randomly spawn

Search

Minimax

function minimax(node, depth, maximizingPlayer) is
    if depth = 0 or node is a terminal node then
        return the heuristic value of node
    if maximizingPlayer then
        value := −∞
        for each child of node do
            value := max(value, minimax(child, depth − 1, FALSE))
        return value
    else (* minimizing player *)
        value := +∞
        for each child of node do
            value := min(value, minimax(child, depth − 1, TRUE))
        return value

minimax(origin, depth, TRUE)

Minimax, alpha-beta pruning

function alphabeta(node, depth, α, β, maximizingPlayer) is
    if depth = 0 or node is a terminal node then
        return the heuristic value of node
    if maximizingPlayer then
        value := −∞
        for each child of node do
            value := max(value, alphabeta(child, depth − 1, α, β, FALSE))
            α := max(α, value)
            if α ≥ β then
                break (* β cut-off *)
        return value
    else
        value := +∞
        for each child of node do
            value := min(value, alphabeta(child, depth − 1, α, β, TRUE))
            β := min(β, value)
            if α ≥ β then
                break (* α cut-off *)
        return value

alphabeta(origin, depth, −∞, +∞, TRUE)