Impulse Wars

A C reinforcement learning environment that is very closely based off of the game Retrograde Arena.

Controls

Controller

• move: left stick
• aim: right stick
• shoot: right bottom trigger
• light brake: left bottom trigger
• hard brake: left top trigger
• burst: right top trigger or bottom face button
  • hold to charge and release to burst
• discard weapon: left face button

Mouse and Keyboard

• move: WASD
• aim: mouse pointer
• shoot: left mouse button
• light brake: spacebar
• burst: right mouse button
  • hold to charge and release to burst

Basics

• blue walls are standard walls
• yellow walls are bouncy
• only way to kill opponents is to push them into red death walls
• shooting them is the primary way to do this
• different weapons spawn randomly on the map and can be picked up
• shooting imposes recoil
• movement can't completely counteract recoil
• braking can help with recoil and help control movement
• braking consumes energy
• energy passively very slowly refills
• energy can be refilled by picking up weapons and by hitting opponents
• if energy is fully depleted no energy can be used until it is fully replenished
• bursting can deflect projectiles and push opponents away
• bursting consumes energy and can be charged for greater effect

Advanced

• movement speed is halved for a short period of time if energy is fully depleted
• while charging a burst the brake can't be used
• any energy gained or lost when charging a burst directly affects the burst charge
• a picked up weapon can be discarded at the expense of some energy

Meta

• bursting can be used aggressively by running down opponents and bursting point blank
• this can be countered by braking and taking advantage of the opponents spent energy bursting
• excessive braking can be countered by powerful weapons
• powerful weapons can be countered by bursting to deflecting projectiles or braking

Building

Build the Python module with make. You can then run the main.py file to train a policy or evaluate one.

Python 3.11 is what I'm developing with, I make no promises for other versions. scikit-core-build is used to build the Python module, but will be installed automatically if the correct make command is invoked. autopxd2 is used to generate declarations in a PXD file for the Cython code, which will automatically be installed as well. There are a few parts of my C headers that autopxd2 fails to parse, but they are guarded by defines.

Structure

Python

• main.py contains the main training/evaluation loop
• policy.py contains the neural network policy
• impulse_wars.py defines the Python environment
• cy_impulse_wars.pyx is the Cython wrapper between Python and C

C environment (src directory)

• include directory contains a few deps from GitHub I converted to be header only
• helpers.h defines small helper functions and macros
• types.h defines most of the types used throughout the project. It's in it's own file to prevent circular dependencies
• settings.h defines general game and environment settings, as well as weapon handling settings/logic
• map.h contains all map layouts and map setup logic
• game.h contains the game logic
• env.h contains the RL environment logic