HuntDojo

A programming practical exercise to be run as a Dojo.

It is based on Daniel Phelps code using Ruby and Gosu library.

The game consists on a few hunters trying to devour a lot of preys.

Those creatures, hunters and preys, are represented by dots on a window. At first, preys only move randomly across the screen and hunters chase the closest prey; being the target of the dojo to programm smarter classes that make preys to live more time or hunters to eat all preys faster. Hunters eat the preys if the move close enough to each other.

The creatures behavior is controlled by a method called update. That is the method we should overwrite to make our preys or hunters more clever. In update method we can check for our position, distance to other creatures, etc; and we can set an acceleration from our actual position letting preys escape for hunters or hunter to chase preys.

In addition to hunter and preys classes, we can add 'utils' or 'helpers' methods that can be used by creatures later, so we could program a method that calculates how close we are to a wall or the direction that we should take to escape from hunters.

Where to program the behavior and how to apply it is discussed in next section.

Usage

Adding helper methods

We can add new helper methods in lib/assets.rb file like these:

module Assets

  def distance_to( particle )
    Math.sqrt( 
      (self.position[:x] - particle.position[:x]) ** 2 + 
      (self.position[:y] - particle.position[:y]) ** 2 
    )
  end

  def distance_to_closest_wall()
    ...
  end

end

Any method defined in lib/assets.rb is available for preys and hunters classes.

Redefining the creature behavior

First, we have to choose one type of creature, preys or hunters (just to know what we want to achieve). Once we know what improvement are we going to program, we create a new file under enhances/ directory (the name is not important as it ends in '.rb').

Next step is to create a new module inside the file, named as we want, and inside that module we overwrite the method update( hunters, preys ). For example, if we choose preys to enhance their behavior we can do this:

module NotReallyAnImprovement
  
  def update( hunters, preys )
    hunter = self.closest( hunters ).first
  
    modulus = 1
    direction = self.angle_to( hunter )
  
    accelerate( modulus , -1 * direction )
  end

end

That make our preys accelerate in opposite direction of closest hunter as fast as they can. So, if we want to try this behavior we do the following:

ruby main.rb --preys NotReallyAnImprovement

This command loads the game using our recently created module to modify the preys behavior. We could use the short option -p to do the same, or use --hunters or -h to change the hunters behavior.

Sadly, once we run the game, we see that this code is not a good example of improvement as it make the preys life shorter but it illustrates well how the creatures behavior is modified.

TODO

Things to accomplish to be functional

Hunters collisions - Done :)
Successives simulation in order to calculate average lifetime
Avoid infite loops by setting maximum lifetime for hunters if they don't eat
Put some informational text on the screen

Advice

Every morning in Africa, a Gazelle wakes up and knows that it must
run faster than the fastest Lion that day, or it will be killed and eaten.
Every morning in Africa, a Lion wakes up and knows that it must run
faster than the slowest Gazelle that day, or it will starve to death. It
doesn't matter if you are a lion or a gazelle: when the sun comes up,
you'd better be running.