Game idea : 4vs4 soccer match.

[Stocha]

Game description :
There is two teams, each team is composed of four round bots.
There a terrain , made of four walls. In two opposite wall there is hole.
There is a round ball.

The goal for each team is to score a maximum of goal. A goal is scored whenever the ball exit the terrain through one of the holes. One hole will give one point to one team. The other hole will give one point to the other team.

The ball and the bots have the same mass. The games features 2d collision neglecting momentum.
There is some friction to limit the max speed.

Bots movement :
Bots have a heading, and can make each turn a forward impulsion (acceleration), or a rotationnal impulsion (angular acceleration).

Collision : Collision are solved with the approximation that there is no rotation, with a classic same mass gaz particule collision solver.

[jocke]

[Surya]

+1

I love the idea! (I interpret football as soccer as well, correct us if we are wrong)

I think games could be very pleasant to watch even for someone not related with the AI field.
The only problem I can see is.. loads of developpers don't like soccer unfortunately :/

Have you considered to make one bot handle only one player on the field?
I'm wondering how the trueskill ranking system would deal with that.

Other than that we could have different kinds of matches (size of the field + players number)
So we could have from 4vs4 to 11vs11 #players games.

Anyway, very good idea

[iouri_]

[Equinoxe]

Except using a team of n times my bot against n times the basic bot ?

[iouri_]

[Equinoxe]

I'm not sure it would be much easier to implement, but it will be much easier to write an AI for.

However, Ants already used n players, so why not doing this with soccer ?

The only technical issue being the ranking of collaborating bots.

[Surya]

The trueskill system can rank quite efficiently players inside teams (as long as they obviously don't play always in the same team)

I think creating a bot for only one soccer player would be funnier (group with other people would make the IRC chan very pleasant to chat in )

On the other hand, I'm afraid the code might be easier and maybe too simple (?) for only 1 player.
We could also have problems with players keeping the ball all the time (which would make the game very frustrating to watch at mid level)

I'm not 100% sure we could really estimate the "best" player at the end of the day. (this is maybe what you pointed out Equinoxe) Even if the system would have a logic, It could be maybe unfair at the end.

I hope this idea could go further because I love it (both ways)

[Equinoxe]

"On the other hand, I'm afraid the code might be easier and maybe too simple (?) for only 1 player."

Too simple, I don't think.
A good bot would have to find which allies are the strongest ones, and which are starter/bad bots ; in order not to send them the ball.

"We could also have problems with players keeping the ball all the time (which would make the game very frustrating to watch at mid level)"
Some solution to this could be to allow players to steal the ball from other players ?
However, this would go far from the original soccer.

In order to add complexity, why not adding bonuses / maluses on the field ? (a bot not using these would of course be able to go to mid-level, that is, it's completely possible to write a good bot without managing these)

"I'm not 100% sure we could really estimate the "best" player at the end of the day. (this is maybe what you pointed out Equinoxe) Even if the system would have a logic, It could be maybe unfair at the end."

Exactly.
The issue being that it would be really slow to rank if only two team play one against each other - I think.
However, when converged, it wouldn't be unfair : the bots who learned to send the ball to other good bots in their team, that are in a team spirit, would be likely to win - and that's the objective, even if moves aren't the best possible ones !

(I'm not a native english speaker, so, if you don't understand me, please let me know !)

[Surya]