Interim Report Update

Met Rem today got 4 previous interim reports off him seems a very managable report. Rem want roughly 2 page intro 2 pages on agents 2 pages on agent factory and 2 pages on soccer server. Then 2 pages on What my plan for the rest of the project is. Limited to 10 pages :( Could do with more space.

Triangulation - whoever invented it deserves a medal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation what a superb site. Have been wondering how to get a decent method of locating my agents on the soccer pitch and have know the answer lay in trigonometry and after much looking I happened upon this gem of a wiki page that answered all my questions. Woot woot now to fix the parsers bugs so I can proceed to getting my locating on

Interim Report Time :(

So since I last blogged a few things have happened. I have finished the text parser just doing the debugging now. I'm working on agent location and movements at the minute. Trying to find out how to best locate the player in the world. Other than that no real concrete progress has been made. I have to admit to a little bit of slacking off and doing other assignments rather than project work. Had a meeting with Rem a week or two ago where we talked about the agent and how we would like to do things was good took some good notes. We talked about how the project is more complicated than we first thought but hopefully I can lay a good foundation to enable some other student to take a crack at making a more complex agent team next year. Showed Rem how the server works and all in all a good meeting was had. Have one tomorrow. Interim report is due next Friday so the plan is to find out what goes into one tomorrow and then do a first draft over the weekend. Supposed to be 10 pages will easily fill that quota. Could fill 10 pages talking about the Soccer Server ffs. Project has turned out to be very complex. By committing to building my own implementation of things like the message parser etc I have taken on a lot of work some of which is very complicated. Hopefully once I get the report out of the way March will prove to be a more productive month. Plan at the minute is to get a draft of the reort done by Monday and sort out the text parser once and for all over the weekend. Gotta get all the kinks ironed out.

Needed SVN or CVS now i have both!!

SO i needed to get some svn or cvs on to backup my code and also to allow me to work on it on my tiptop in windows and linux and not need to do stupid usb backups. So i set up a Surce Fordge account and registered my project. Source Fordge gave me access to cvs woot woot. 20 mins after i had been given cvs by Source Fordge my Supervisor emailed me and said i could now use the svn that agent factory has on source fordge. So the plan now is to use my cvs for my random test code and the agent factory svn for what i would call propper code backup. Eg stuff that works and not little test programs designed for experimentation purposes.

I love Binary Chop :D

So i finally tackled the big "server_param" message. It contains 153 variables so my first approach was to just make 153 if/else statements and use a for loop and the java string splitter as mentioned before. This turned out to be 11,781 operations which is not good. I'm sure it would work but i couldn't leave it like that so i decided to use binary chop and then sort by most occurences. This has brought the parsing down to at most 20*153 which is 3060 opperations but as this is worst case and we have sorted according to higher occurances it will be signifigantly less which is a saving of a lot of opperations. I'm sure i could get this down to 153 operations but my current method will allow for my method to be easily adjusted to handle future "server_param" messages which may have been reordered or even extended. Just have to get the "see" and "sense_body" game time messages done now, I am going to look into recursion for them as they need to be uber fast.

Soooo how exactly do i move and Stuff?????

So it would appear that this week I have again delayed my basic agent factory agent making (really need to start doing that soon) and have instead decided on looking into how people make players do stuff lick dribble and pass to a team mate. My current approach is to make all the Java methods to do these basic and non basic movements so that when its time to agent it up I can just use them as actuators in my agent factory agent. One of the perks of how agent factory is designed may I add. Anyways off I go to see how other people have approached my task.