Comment by fdej | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fdej | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see a single-player bot that can do human-level speedruns and/or beat stuff like https://www.twitch.tv/blooditekrypto/v/30795033

Baby steps. Beating other bots in deathmatch is a good start. I love that they only use the rocket launcher, giving the careless bot an equal chance of blowing itself up.

Parsing what's on the screen in Doom is potentially a lot easier than in modern games: since there is no texture filtering or anti-aliasing, and due to the 2.5D perspective, most vertical runs of pixels on the screen map exactly to (linearly?) scaled columns in wall textures or sprites. I would not be surprised if you could come up with a fairly simple algorithm to determine the exact position and orientation of the player and the objects on screen within the map, without any real AI/learning involved.

How do you figure? The doom maps are almost all completely dull looking and gray, aren't lit realistically (so depth from shading becomes harder to determine), and because of no anti-aliasing, lines are far more jagged (meaning the computer needs to be smarter, in order to join disparate lines together it 'thinks' are connected). There's barely any distinguishing features separating wall boundaries from texture details either. I think you might be underestimating the challenge here.

> The doom maps are almost all completely dull looking and gray

I will fight you ;-)

But seriously: The project uses a source port of Doom[1] based on ZDoom[2] which supports high screen and texture resolutions, mouse look, colored lights etc.

Although I think that since Doom has less visual clutter (bloom, shadows, ambient occlusion, screen distortion) than a modern AAA game its display should be easier to read.

[1] https://github.com/Marqt/ViZDoom [2] http://zdoom.org/About

How is an anti-aliased line easier to read for a computer? It should be fairly easy to find lines and use those to get vanishing points for orientation. Distance of enemies should be more or less a mapping of screen height, since you're mostly looking straight-forward. It sounds super doable, especially with machine learning becoming a thing, more or less delegating the task of putting all those inputs together to make sense of it to the computer.

Well you have more unique features from which you can do localization on.

VizDoom provides access to the depth buffer.

https://github.com/Marqt/ViZDoom

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