I'm looking for advice on how to implement online chess move validation using a winboard chess engine. I am creating a mobile battle chess game in Unity 2020.3. Right now I have the possible moves for each player, castle rights, check status, etc being generated by an open source C# chess engine. I chose this engine because it's written in C# and the code could be directly included in my Unity Project. I successfully wrote my own code that connects this chess engine to a 3D battle chess game.
How the game works (video preview):
A piece is selected by the player clicking it with their mouse or
tapping the screen.
The possible moves for the current board are calculated by the chess engine.
I use the possible move indexes to show possible move highlights.
When a player makes one of these possible moves, the move is applied on the chess engine.
It becomes the other player's turn.
I have some custom code to run player animations, based on the kind of move (ex. an attack animation runs when a piece is captured). I also show have screens that show when it's time for a promotion, a player is in check, or the game is over.
I'd like to somehow make the process of calculating possible moves and applying moves to be done on a server. My goal is to protect from players sending illegal moves to the board and breaking the game.
How would you recommend I approach this problem? This is the last thing I need to turn this game into an enjoyable online experience. I just lack the crucial skill of understanding how to make this game online.
On the server, you'll have a separate version of the chess game running.
A player(/client) will send a move to the server (so a unique piece ID, and the target square the player wants to move).
On the server-side, you'll need to check to see if that move is indeed possible. This could be by getting all possible moves from that piece, and checking to see if the intendedChessPosition can be found in the list of possibleChessPositions that was calculated on server-side. Only then, will you actually move the piece server-side.
All players/clients will communicate using the server as the middleman and authority.
The exact implementation could change depending on the API of the chess engine you're using, but that's the basic idea.
Related
Im working on a demo project, where I use Unity 3D and Photon Unity network(PUN) for a real time game.
The person in the top panel is an enemy unit, controlled by another player who does damage to the player on the bottom left (1/3 hp left).
However, the person on the bottom right is a healer who can heal the bottom left player (both controlled by the local player).
Here's my problem! Since it isn't turn based and has to happen real time. How do I design my multiplayer system? Ive previously worked on turn based games, where I just pass the indices and mirror the events taking place locally, in the remote player as well.
But here with latency in the picture, I do not know how to proceed!
What I would like to do is, have the healer heal the player locally as well on the remote player's phone before he is attacked by the remote player or kill the player before the healer can heal his hp depending on the timestamp in which the events happen and reflect such on both the devices.
I think you are confused with some of the pun networking features.
If the healer heals your local player, so will be the remote instances of your local player. Your healing system must be networked of course, make sure you go through our basic tutorial to learn how to implement a simple health system.
https://doc.photonengine.com/en-us/pun/v2/demos-and-tutorials/pun-basics-tutorial/player-networking#health_synchronization
What will be slightly more complex than health management is the switch between your player and healer locally. for this you have two main variants.
transfer ownership between the player and healer: https://doc.photonengine.com/en-us/pun/v1/demos-and-tutorials/package-demos/ownership-transfer (this is a v1 demo but the principle still applies to v2)
have a invisible network player, and using your own logic in your game, have the player matching this invisible network player or the healer matching it.
Recently I've been messing around with machine learning and I wanted to see if I could create AI for the game I'm currently making. The AI should be able to solve the puzzle for you.
The game currently works as followed. You have a few tiles in a grid, some of them are movable some of them aren't. You click on a tile you want to move, and you drag it into a direction. It'll then start moving the tiles and optionally also the player character itself. The end goal is to reach the end tile. Level example, Solving the level
Playing the game yourself:
Whenever you select a tile (you do this by clicking), you then hold the mouse button down, and drag onto the direction you want the tile to move towards. Once the tiles are done moving, the player object will move one step in the same direction. If the player is on top of a tile that you move, it'll move with the tile. And afterwards do another step in the same direction.
I was wondering if it's possible (and if so, how) for machine learning to define a position on the screen, (optionally) click and then define a movement direction?
Please keep in mind that I'm fairly new to machine learning!
To give some more clarification:
The grid is static for now, to keep it simple for the AI. But later one, the goal is to generate a level randomly, and see if it can solve it.
In theory, all the AI should have to do, is select a tile to move (A number between 0 and the width of the grid, and the same for the height). And define a movement direction. Either (0, 1), (0, -1), (1, 0) or (-1, 0).
Falling off the grid will results in a reset.
Reaching the end of the grid results in a win.
Moving in an invalid direction results in a reset.
Based off of your bullet points, I would honestly suggest just implementing the A* Pathfinding algorithm, with some modifications to emulate machine learning. The A* Pathfinding algorithm determines the best path on a grid from point a to point b, and using clever programming you could achieve the result you want with a reasonable amount of overhead.
Something along the lines of having a list of "do not touch" grid points(death traps, etc), which gets filled as the AI runs into them, so on the next iteration it knows not to take that path. This is a very basic abstraction of your idea, but would be highly obtainable.
Obviously we cannot write the code for you, luckily there are tons of resources on A* Pathfinding to help you get started!
Here is a simple tutorial
Here is an implementation that was used in Unity
Here is a code review on someones implementation
Assuming you actually want to use machine learning and not just a pathing system:
I will lay out some pseudo code that you can use for a basic scenario of the AI learning a static board. There are different ways you can write and implement this code, I have only suggested one way. But before we get to that lets first discuss this project overall and some suggestions for it.
Suggestions:
I would say that you will want to measure the game state on the board, and not the mouse movements. So basically the AI is measuring what moves can be made. The mouse movement part is just a way for the player to interact with the board so it is not needed by the AI. It will be simpler to just let the AI make the moves directly.
I don't think that unity is a good platform for this kind of experimentation. I think you would be better off programming this in a console program. So for example using a 2 dimensional array (board) in a visual studio c# console program, or in a C console program via CS50 IDE (comes with free sign up via edx.org for cs50 https://manual.cs50.net/ide). I have suggested these because I think Unity will just add unnecessary layers to a machine learning experiment.
My assumption is you want to learn machine learning, and not just how to make an ai solve a puzzle in your game. Because in the latter case better options would be a proper pathing system, or having the ai brute force several attempts at the puzzle before moving and select the solution with the fewest steps.
Pseudo Code:
Now onto some pseudo code for your machine learning program.
Assumptions:
A. You have a board with set dimensions that you can pass to the Ai at the start.
B. There are tiles on the board the AI cannot move into (obstacles).
C. The AI should learn to solve the problem, instead of having the answer at the beginning because of good code that we designed (like a decent pathing system).
D. We don't want the AI to brute force this by trying a billion different combinations before moving, because this suggests perfect understanding of its environment. If the ai has perfect understanding of its environment then yes, it should use brute force where reasonable.
Coding Logic:
Scenario 1: The AI plays on the same board every time with the same starting conditions.
I. You start by setting a discrete amount of time in which the AI makes a move. For example 1 move every 1 second.
II. Have a counter for the number of moves made to reach the end tile, and record the sequence of moves associated with this counter.
III. If the AI has no history with which to make a move it makes a move in a random direction.
IV. If the move is invalid then the counter increases and the move is recorded, but the AI stays on the same tile.
V. When the AI completes the puzzle the counter and sequence of moves is stored for later use.
VI. In subsequent play throughs the AI always starts by selecting the paths it has tried with smallest count.
VII. Once the AI begins moving it has a 1% chance per move to try something different. Here is an example. When the 1% is triggered the AI has a 50% to try one of the following:
a. 50% chance: It checks through all the sequences in its history to see if there is any section in the past sequences where the counter between its current tile and the finish tile is shorter than its current path. If there are multiple it selects the shortest. When the AI finishes the round it records the new total sequence taken.
b. 50% chance. The Ai makes a move in a random direction. If it made a move in a random direction. Subsequent moves again follow this logic of 50% chance check, and 50% chance move randomly again. When completed again record the sequence of moves.
VIII. You can seed this by making the AI run the puzzle a 10,000 times in a few seconds behind the scenes, and then when you observe it afterwards it should have selected a reasonable path.
If a computer can brute force a problem in reasonable time it should start with that. However bear in mind that machine learning in a computer program where the machine already knows all the variables is different from machine learning in the environment, where for example you have a robot that has to navigate an unknown environment. The above code should work in the latter case. You may also want to investigate the idea of the AI mapping out the entire terrain by trying to move to every tile and forming an understanding of the environment, then just brute forcing a solution once it understands the variables.
In a non static environment you will want to enhance the valuation system. This answer is already too long so I won't go into it.
Short answer to both questions: Yes,
You can create an ai that uses either gamestate (so it can read the objects/properties of your grid) or you could use raw-screen input combined with image processing, which is a hard thing to create, and expensive (computational) to run.
On the Unity forms there are several answers to the question "How to mimic mouse input" or alike. Take a look here:
https://answers.unity.com/questions/564664/how-i-can-move-mouse-cursor-without-mouse-but-with.html
If you are looking for the code for the AI, sadly, you are out of luck. There are lots of ai tutorials online to create a simple ai for such a game. I would advice not to dive head-first in the fancy stuff (like neural networks) and start simple. It would be the best, in my opinion, too start with creating an (class) structure for your ai, and start learning AI by practice. Start with an "AI" that just randomly returns something, then see what you can learn & manage online and make other versions.
For one of the first AI's, take a look into goal-driven AI's or state-machines. I think they should be able to give nice results, given your gifs.
I am creating a tower defense game, i need help with a method or program to make it a tile map so then i can slowly input enemies on a road have turrets that shoot at them etc, i have already tried:
Inputting a picture one by one which i failed on.
Also i tried using the program called tiled but i failed on understand how that makes it tile map so i am pretty lost on the definition on tile map now.
Could someone make some suggestions, links, explanations would be very helpful?
You can load maps generated by 'Tiled' using 'TiledSharp'.
You'll have to figure another way for getting the enemies to move on the map, getting the towers to shoot them, etc. Try this for a start:
Algorithms for realtime strategy wargame AI
You can also try to use Unity3D that might already have something ready for use (unless, of course, the reason is for you to learn the algorithms rather than making the game).
If you need more help please specify exactly what it is you're looking for, i.e. displaying the map, moving the forces, shooting at the forces, UI, etc.
I'm actually working on a board game using unity. It's a board game where players have to connect two opposites borders by claiming empty hexagonal cases. Borders are assigned to players at the beginning.
I chose to represent my empty cases with gems, white when unclaimed, and red or blue for players. So I made a single prefab for all gems.
To check connections between gems themselves and with borders, I assigned to them slightly bigger box colliders so they are colliding (trigger) with other objects, so I can detect if a claimed gem is connected (directly or not) to a border. I wrote this code generically as gems are one single prefab, naively thinking that every entity would run its own version of the script.. But that's not the case.
So I'm looking for an alternative way to detect connections with borders, but still generically, as the size of the board is variable.
Thanks in advance !
Your problem is closely related on how you break your game in game objects and components on Unity3D.
First of all, use scripts to define components. For example your gems could have a script that contains data related to its state (your white, red and blue gems meaning empty, playerA and playerB).
You will probably need a game object (normally called a GameManager) to handle all behavior related to game rules like which player is playing, if a player can pick a specific gem and if a player won the game. Depending on the game complexity is a good idea to also have a game object with a component (script) to keep your board state, instead of simply getting it from the gems objects Transform component.
After you have structured your game you do not need colliders to detect connections. Every time you have to check for connections, just iterate over your gems or use your board state object.
Edit:
References to help you develop your game:
How do I represent a hextile/hex grid in memory?
Creating a holder for game level for simple board tile based game.
creating 2d table\chess board\2d array
I'm making a role playing game in C# using XNA. I already have a map and some stuff, but that's not interesting at the moment. My question is: How can I give the player the possibility to enter houses or rooms?
To create the worlds, I've used standard int-arrays where each number represents a different type of tile. That works all fine, but the house isn't enterable but a solid textured block of something.
BTW I've used a Vector3 to determine in which world the player's currently located and which one the program must load next.
Any suggestions how I can make the houses enterable?
One easy way to make houses enterable is to create a trigger object at the door of the house.
This object can be a simple Rect along with an id.
While the player moves around your map check for a collision between the player and the trigger.
When the player enters this trigger you can change the displayed map with a new one (the interior of the house) and move the player where the door should lead.
If you're using C# to make a game, you might want to consider switching to MonoGame (which is practically XNA's successor since XNA is dead) or Unity.
As mentioned previously, your best option in XNA is to create a Rectangle which will trigger on collision and change the game world.