International Journal of Computer Information Systems and Industrial Management Applications. ISSN 2150-7988 Volume 4 (2012) pp. 121-129 © MIR Labs, www.mirlabs.net/ijcisim/index.html MoonGate: RTS Engine with User-Oriented Architecture Rudolf Kajan1 and Adam Herout2 1 Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology, Božetěchova 2, 612 66 Brno, Czech Republic [email protected] 2 Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology, Božetěchova 2, 612 66 Brno, Czech Republic [email protected] Abstract: This paper introduces MoonGate - a real-time prevents researchers, students and hobbyists from connecting strategy engine based on replaceable components, thus serving as their own modules to them. A shortage of artificial intelligence an easily customizable educational environment for studying a competitions based on real-time strategies also deprives wide range of problems in several research areas. artificial intelligence researchers and enthusiasts of an The implemented engine also supports, alongside the Windows opportunity to compare their algorithms [6]. Moreover, platform, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming console, making it the first open source starter kit and real-time strategy engine for available free RTS engines are usually too complex to serve as Xbox 360. MoonGate’s main goal is to attract students, a practical educational and demonstrational tool in courses academics and indie game developers to learn by creating highly (for example, Spring [10] engine v.0.8.1 has 340641 lines of interactive and visually attractive games, and by providing easily code in 1425 files). understandable and highly customizable educational In order to address these problems, MoonGate [7] – an open environment which incorporates the best features of modern source, real-time strategy game engine for Xbox 360 and commercial games, visualization environments and game Windows platforms, was designed and implemented. middleware. MoonGate‘s main purpose is to attract academics, students and hobbyists to learn by creating games and giving them an Keywords: MoonGate, real-time strategy, user-oriented opportunity to easily study various problems by providing architecture, game components, strategy middleware easily understandable and customizable educational environment accompanied by a repository of components varying from terrain, particle systems, bone animations to I. Introduction shaders. These are easily readable and reusable without the Out of many game genres that are available nowadays, one of need to study the non-related support parts of the code as it is the most important is the genre of real-time strategy games, common in other engines. since they are useful from an entertainment as well as serious MoonGate Engine was designed and implemented with the games perspective [1]. Researchers such as [2], [3], [4] or [5] following in mind: suggest that real-time strategy games also offer a wide variety Simple extensibility through usage of reusable of fundamental AI research problems. components. Real-time strategy is the genre of computer games that Content pipeline that allows easy creation and import of encompasses tactical games that happen in real-time. content. ―Real-time‖ means that there is a continuous flow of time in Tweaking without the need of source code recompilation. the game world, so that immediate decision making and responding quickly to arising situations is important. These Exploiting benefits of target platforms for learning games can be viewed as simplified military simulations played purposes. by two or more players where each player can be in control of In order to achieve the mentioned properties, the XNA potentially hundreds of units with specific properties and Framework and the Xbox 360 game console were chosen as abilities. the most suitable to create a base upon which MoonGate was One of the current problems is that commercial game implemented. developers and researchers do not focus on exactly the same One of the reasons behind the selection of the XNA elements. Up until now, game companies have spent more time Framework is the fact that since its release in 2006 XNA has on improving the game‘s graphics more than any other part of seen a surge of momentum with more than 1 million it and commercial RTS games are closed software which Dynamic Publishers, Inc., USA 122 Kajan and Herout downloads of the tool and more than one thousand academic clients have built-in support for all standard features like universities globally [8] are using XNA in their classrooms. automatic game and map downloading, chat and friends lists. That is why MoonGate can stay really close to its target Spring‘s architecture allows for the usage of third party AIs audience – students, teachers, and indie game developers and that can work very competently in many cases with multiple keep constantly evolving. Spring engine based games. Very extensive Lua interface allows users to create custom II. Existing Real-Time Strategy Engines (graphical) user interfaces. Through third party widgets, users are able to improve not only the GUI, but also gameplay. Currently there are only a few open source real-time strategy Spring with a built-in physics engine supports realistic engines freely available to the general public that were projectiles trajectories, deformable terrain, forest fires and developed to a phase when they are actually usable as a dynamic water. visualization tool or a test-bed for algorithms. The vast majority of produced engines are commercial, which means C. Glest only very limited usability by students and researchers due to Glest [11] is a free 3D real-time strategy game built on a severely limited options in their modification. Some of the custom engine. It is a multi-platform project written in C++ mostly used 3D open source real-time strategy engines are with portability in mind, so it can be compiled easily on stated below. Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OSX. Glest uses the cross platform OpenGL API to render 3D graphics. For unit A. ORTS – Open real-time strategy models and animations, Glest uses its own 3D format; an The ORTS project [9] was started with the goal of creating a export plugin for 3D Studio Max, and tools for Blender are free software system that lets people and machines play fair available. Every unit, building, upgrade, faction, resource and RTS games. It is a programming environment for studying all their properties and commands are defined in XML files. real-time AI problems such as path finding, dealing with imperfect information, scheduling, and planning in the domain D. Common problems of real-time strategy games. The problem that often plagues (mainly freely available) game The communication protocol is public and all source code engines and starter kits is difficult extension. These engines and artwork is freely available. Users can connect whatever and starter kits are not designed with extensibility in mind client software they like. This is made possible by a server / from the beginning. When users would like to extend them in client architecture in which only the currently visible parts of some way, it is often almost impossible to do so without the game state are sent to the players. making (rather large) changes in overall project structure, This openness leads to new and interesting possibilities mainly due to changes not only in components, but also due to ranging from on-line tournaments of autonomous AI players to changes in connections among these affected components. gauge their playing strength to hybrid systems in which human Afterwards, thorough regression testing is usually needed to players use sophisticated GUIs which allow them to delegate verify the correctness of changed couplings and parts of the tasks to AI helper modules for increased performance. code. These engines and starter kits are thus hardly usable – ORTS is not a single RTS game, but an RTS game engine. easy extensibility is one of the key features that are expected. Users define the game they want to play in the form of scripts Some engines even use content that is very hard to which describe all unit types, structures and their interactions. understand and create. For example, we can see quite often These scripts are loaded by the ORTS server and executed. binary 3D models with built-in parameters for an engine‘s The second part of the ORTS system is client software model and texture processors that were set in 3D content which connects to the server and generates actions for objects creation application, shaders that are referenced directly from in the game. The server sends player views to the clients and models or skeletal animations exported in an undocumented receives actions for all the player objects, which are then way. In this case, it is difficult to create one‘s own game executed. This loop is executed multiple times a second. If the content, which again lowers the usability of an engine or a 3D graphics client is connected, the world is rendered using starter kit as a whole. OpenGL and the user can issue commands using the mouse It is not an easy task to avoid these common pitfalls and and keyboard. create an educational environment that is not overwhelmingly complex and easily customizable. There are examples of B. Spring engine successful projects in nearly every game genre, like the Spring [10] is a project aimed to create a new and versatile already mentioned Spring from real-time strategy genre, which open source (GPLv2) real-time strategy engine. Spring is a is often chosen for visualization of AI algorithms, or genre of multi-platform project written in C++, using OpenGL, role-playing games, where many solid educational OpenAL, SDL, boost, 7zip and Lua scripting language. videogames have been developed to run on one of the At the moment Spring fully supports Windows and Linux iterations of Neverwinter Nights [14] using the Aurora platforms, while the Mac OSX version is currently not Neverwinter Toolset (Aurora is part of Neverwinter Night‘s available.