SVG woes #
I've been working on some new illustrations for my game programming pages. In the past I had created bitmap diagrams using Gimp or by writing custom code. This time I'm using Inkscape, which produces SVG, in the hopes that I can directly embed SVG onto the web page.
Unfortunately browser support for SVG stinks.
First, not all browsers support SVG. So you need a fallback. That's fine; I can produce PNGs with Inkscape.
Second, there's the question of whether to use <embed> or <object> tags. The answer seems to be that <object> is the “right” answer, but it crashes Safari 1.0. So I should use <embed>, right? I would, except <embed> doesn't support fallbacks.
This means that I to support browsers without SVG (by using PNG fallbacks), I have to crash the Safari browser. Ugh.
Even if that problem is solved, the next problem is that different SVG implementations support different features. Adobe's SVG plugin, Mozilla/Firefox SVG, and Opera SVG are all different. Even the very simple SVG I wrote does not work the same on all three. Opera does not seem to support text at all.
Browser vendors: it's worse to have limited SVG support than no support. With no support, the fallback will be used, and the reader will see something useful. With limited support, the reader will get a broken diagram.
Even if browsers supported SVG, the web server I use does not use the correct MIME type. It sends text/xml instead of image/svg+xml. I'm not sure how much this matters in practice though. (Side note: I find it interesting the change from text to image. This is going to generally be a confusing point with XML, since it's text underneath, but the rendering of it may not be.)
I have decided not to embed SVG on my pages (although I might link to it). I will turn SVG into PNG and embed PNG on my pages.
Black and White 2 AI #
I played Black and White 2 for many hours yesterday. The computer player and I were in a stalemate. The computer kept sending armies against me and I kept defeating them. I had built my town with walls around it, and then put archers on top of the walls. I was building up my strength while defending myself, in preparation for a big attack. I felt pretty safe.
After around 40 attacks, I realized that they weren't all the same. The computer wasn't using the same attackers each time. It tried the creature, archers, swordsmen, and catapults. It tried combinations of them. Sometimes it would come through my main entrance, and sometimes it would come around the back entrance to the city. The computer player also destroyed major sections of the city using the “earthquake” power, but I recovered from these too. After a while the enemy creature figured out that he should kick my wall in. His archers and swordsmen stayed back, out of range, while the creature came up and destroyed my wall, including the archers on it. After it breached the wall, the army swarmed into my town and killed half my people.
I rebuilt my wall and started to recover, but the computer's newly discovered strategy worked well. It tried several variants but kept going back to the same approach: kick down the wall, then swarm the town. This forced me to try some new strategies. Although being on the wall has advantages, it leaves the archers vulnerable when the enemy creature attacks the wall. So I moved them behind the wall. I've also learned to open my gate, wait for the enemy army to get close, then close the gate and set their army on fire. I have no good strategy for the creature knocking down my wall though, and I'm constantly losing townspeople and then rebuilding.
After a long stalemate, the computer AI learned how to attack more effectively, and now I'm having trouble keeping my city safe. I'm very impressed by the AI. I'm not sure how it's programmed, but it tried out many different things and learned which ones work the best. From the game AI techniques I've learned (genetic algorithms, neural networks, fuzzy logic, state machines, etc.), the AI in Black and White 2 seems to match most closely with what I know about reinforcement learning. It's a technique that uses online learning (observing results as the game is played) instead of training (from examples constructed ahead of time), allows both exploration (trying new things in order to learn) and exploitation (taking advantage of what you've learned), and associates rewards (like whether the attack was successful) with actions (like kicking down the wall and keeping the army away from my archers). I recommend Sutton and Barto's book if you want to learn more. It's entirely possible though that the game uses something much simpler that just happens to look impressive, but my guess is that it's using reinforcement learning.
Labels: review