We’ve settled on a weekend for the Spring tournament! The 3rd semi-annual MegaMiner AI Tournament (we’re still looking for a new name!) will be held on the weekend of April 17th. The specific dates and times haven’t been selected yet – we’ll make another post when they’re set.

Development updates that I know of: Steven and Bohde have been working on the protocol for next semester – something with Domain Specific Languages and automatic protocol generation is in the works. Stephen is working on the game logic implementation, and Ben is mulling over OpenGL books

We’ve expanded our team a bit – the current team is:

• Ben Murrell – Visualization, Fearless Leader
• Steven Wallace – Client, Fearless Co-Leader
• Stephen Mues – Server
• Andrew Schrader – PR
• Brian Goldman – Concepts, balancing
• Kyle Steinert – Concepts, balancing
• Josiah Worcester – Client
• Alex St. John – Visualizer
• Josh Bohde – Server
• Sean Schmidt – PR

Yep, that’s 10 people – quite a jump from the last two semesters… but it’s a good thing. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us – we’ve already laid out all of the details for the game, now it’s just a matter of implementing all of them. We’ll also be dedicating more time to planning the actual tournament this semester – like we said before, we want a better Arena up and running when competitors arrive. We also want more competitors from more schools, which means we’ll be spending more time inviting schools out to the competition. Finally, we’re aiming to get some sponsorship for the event – perhaps t-shirts, food, or prizes. We’ll keep you updated as things progress!

We’ve already started work on the Spring 2009 game!

So far, the team is:

• Ben Murrell – Visualization, Fearless Leader
• Steven Wallace – Client, Fearless Co-Leader
• Stephen Mues – Server
• Andrew Schrader – PR
• Brian Goldman – Concepts, balancing
• Kyle Steinert – Concepts, balancing
• Gerald Holt – ???

We’ve already settled on a game idea – in record time too. Last time it took ~5 weeks, this time it took ~15 minutes. I have to say, the game idea is really sweet, and when it’s finished we should be able to get a lot of people to come compete. We haven’t seen anything like it in the genre of AI Tournament games… I wish I could tell you more,  but you’ll have to wait to find out!

We have several general objectives for this game, the first is that we want a 3D visualizer that is built into the client binary (as opposed to past competitions where the visualizer is a separate program). I’ll be working on this, and I’m going to be working with OpenGL and the SDL so we can remain cross-platform. We also want the client to have bindings for several languages – Steven is taking over this; he plans to implement the client in C, then provide bindings for Java, C++, and Python. Hopefully with more languages available, we’ll be able to pull in more competitors, and competitors from other schools as well. Our other big push is to make the tournament experience much better this semester – this means we’ll be putting more time into the Arena server, simplifying the process of hosting/joining games, creating an automatic upgrade process (so everyone doesn’t have to build on the same machine in order to get transparent updates to the client), having the game well balanced before the competition, and having a few staff AI’s to compete against from the beginning.