ORTS Engine (open source)

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[url=\"http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~mburo/orts/#Overview\"]ORTS[/url] is a programming environment for RTS games.

# What does ORTS stand for?
Open Real-Time Strategy

# What are the project goals?
ORTS is a programming environment for studying real-time AI problems such as pathfinding, dealing with imperfect information, scheduling, and planning in the domain of RTS games. These games are fast-paced and very popular. Furthermore, the current state of RTS game AI is bleak which is mainly caused by the lack of planning and learning - areas in which humans are currently much better than machines. Therefore, RTS games make an ideal test-bed for real-time AI research. Unfortunately, commercial RTS games are closed software which prevents researchers from connecting remote AI modules to them. Furthermore, commercial RTS games are based on peer-to-peer technology - which in a nutshell runs the entire simulation on all player machines and just hides part of the game state from the players. By tampering with the client software it is possible to reveal the entire game state and thereby gain an unfair advantage. We feel that this is unacceptable for playing games on the internet. We therefore started the ORTS project to create a free software system that lets people and machines play fair RTS games. The communication protocol is public and all source code and artwork is freely available. Users can connect whatever client software they like. This is made possible by a server/client architecture in which only the currently visible parts of the game state are sent to the players. This openness leads to new and interesting possibilities ranging from on-line tournaments of autonomous AI players to gauge their playing strength to hybrid systems in which human players use sophisticated GUIs which allow them to delegate tasks to AI helper modules of increasing performance.

# What is the current state?
We have a working platform-independent server/client RTS game engine which includes a 3d OpenGL GUI. We are working on a standard ORTS game and flexible client software right now. By autumn 2006 we hope to have a working system which is interesting for both RTS players and AI researchers.

# How does ORTS work?
ORTS is not a single RTS game, it's an RTS game engine. Users define the game they want to play in form of scripts which describe all unit types, structures, and their interactions. These scripts are loaded by the ORTS server and executed. The second part of the ORTS system is client software which connects to the server and generates actions for objects in the game. The server sends player views to the clients and receives actions for all the player objects, which are then executed. This loop is executed multiple times a second. If the 3d graphics client is connected, the world is rendered using OpenGL and the user can issue commands using the mouse and keyboard.

# How is ORTS licenced?
ORTS is free software. It is licensed under the GNU public license (GPL). This means that all source code of ORTS is available, changable, and freely redistributable. It also means that publicly available applications using ORTS source code must also be licensed under the GPL.

# What programming language is ORTS implemented in and what libraries does it use?
C++ is used for the server and client cores, and a home-brewed scripting language for defining games and customizing the GUI. We currently make use of the standard C++ library, Boost, SDL, SDL_net, and OpenGL in conjunction with glew.

# Is ORTS platform independent?
Yes - as long as the libraries mentioned above are available. We started off implementing ORTS on Linux and Cygwin using g++, but recently also managed to compile it natively on Windows using MS VC++ by working around several problems - most notably the unsupported typeof functionality. In April 2006 we got ORTS working in the MinGW environment and cygwin, which is now the preferred way of running ORTS under Windows.

System Requirements
For the graphics client (ortsg) under Linux to reach frame rates >= 20 fps, currently you'll need a mid-range NVIDIA graphics card because the Linux ATI drivers are poor (as of mid 2005). Under Windows there is no such restriction. Having at least 128 MB of video RAM helps and 512 MB of system RAM is minimum when using ortsg.