Proposal for restructuring the project. about microrts

[santiontanon]

Hi Scott,

I really like the idea of the configurable main file. There is currently an attempt at this coded by Nicolas Barriga (basically this is what he was using for running his experiments) in test/RunConfigurableExperiments.java. But I haven't used it myself, so I don't know how flexible is it. But this is something that I'd definitively want to do. Your proposal sounds pretty good, so, if that ends up being enough, it should replace the current test/RunConfigurableExperiments.java. Since that would not break anything, if you want to do a pull request with that part, please go ahead, since I think that's be a great addition!!!! (thanks one more time for your contributions!!)

About the project restructuring, I am a bit hesitant about it... on the one hand I have always wanted to add unit tests, but never had the bandwidth to create them. But on the other hand, I don't like the idea to adhere to a given building pipeline (e.g., gradle) (I've had bad experiences in the past committing to certain building pipelines or third-party dependencies, that I never thought would disappear and they did). So, I understand the advantages, but this is something I will need to think about a bit more before deciding one way or the other! I'll keep it in mind though!

[scottazord]

Hi Santiago,

Understandable about the project restructure, thought it was a bit of a stretch myself.

In regards to the configurable main file, i'll send the PR asap. Though at the moment it's only suitable for one remote agent playing against a local bot, is this fine?.

The future plan was to allow the configuration to support N number of remote agents along side M number of bots.

[santiontanon]

I think it's a good starting point anyway. Perhaps instead of "server = true/false", we could have a "mode = server/client/standalone", and in the third mode, the game would would just run on its own, locally.

The only thing that would have to be added is to specify the opponents to use.

Once this is set up, extensions can be easily added to specify whether we want to save a replay to a file or not, launch a window to see the game progress graphically or not, etc. But those can be added later. And of course, once functionality is complete, I'd like to then remove the test/RunConfigurableExperiments.java class, for not having replicated functionality.

[scottazord]

#20 Have sent a pull request containing the main class.

[santiontanon]

got it! I'm going to leave this issue open, to remind myself of extending the new main class to support the whole range of configuration options of the game

[santiontanon]

I just extended your class a bit to allow for Stand alone games. I also changed the "TOURNAMENT" constant to "GUI", since there are more things the GUI can do, and also made some parameters optional (for example, if you are not running CLIEN/SERVER, you can leave out the IP, port, etc. of the config file, and it'll work fine).

But thanks for creating those classes, it was actually a very flexible way to configure the game, and I feel it can be extended very easily now! So, I am going to close this issue, but if there is any additional feature you would like in the MicroRTS.java main file, by all means feel free to reopen! :)