It was with a mix of disappointment and relief that I learned cs234, the final course for my Artificial Intelligence Graduate Certificate from Stanford, cancelled the project for this quarter. With the course going fully online due to the pandemic, the rational was to give everyone a bit of a break. That is perfectly reasonable given the work projects often entail, but it would have been pretty cool.
As such, development is once again suspended. (These Stanford courses are a lot of work, and there is a family and a job.) During the December sprint, however, I am happy to say that quite a bit of progress was made:
- A line of code was written – Just doing anything after 4 years is an accomplishment.
- Automated combat with enhanced messaging and logging – When I do get around to building a deep RL model to train the agents, this will be handy.
- Created the wizard class with wizard spells, including touch spell attacks – This one rounds out the fighters, clerics and rouges. I won’t be adding any new classes for a while.
- Group combat – Previously it was the ‘hero’ versus the monsters, but now two groups of combatants can fight each other.
- Charging, flanking and cover – These add a little more dynamic to the combat.
- Ferocity – Orcs just became much more challenging.
- Fixed a bunch of bugs – Always a decent idea.
So, what does all this progress look like? Here’s a little demo video set to O Fortuna from Carmina Burana by the MIT Concert Choir.
I’ll try to pick it up again in April, but we have to see how that goes.
