I think I don’t really need to explain what a 4X game is, maybe not even what the 4X stand for. But, I’ll do it anyway - the gameplay loop of a typical 4X game is: ![Image](4x_game.dot.png", alt=“The 4 Xs”, caption=“A loop of loops - that is 4X) eXplore eXpand eXploit eXterminate Much of the fun of this simple formula comes from the fact that none of those factors stands on its own. You usually cannot expand without exploring first. Sometimes to expand by exterminating an enemy at a location first. What is there to exploit, if you did not expand before? And how will you exterminate, if you lack the resources you ought to have exploited first. ...

So Sonko started a new project. Following suit, I jumped back in time to already have a game project on-going for quite some time now. A bad habit of mine is to reach some milestone and then “pause” (drop) the project. But now I’ll return to it, and as a small incentive to keep on it, I’ll start this blog. As with Sonko, this means my StarCraft AI related projects are on hold (don’t worry, the basil ladder will keep running). ...

This was meant to be a tech related blog, mostly for Broodwar AI related stuff and private projects. Since private projects are included, I guess one could call my son a private project. Screaming into the light, he was born in late February. His name is Benjamin, which I am certain means horse-dung in some weird language. I do not care, go away! And due to Corona, we have been left alone for most of the time since then. ...

Looking back… I need a bit of DIY GitHub API for Rust. Still step 2: Create a branch and PR automatically Thankfully, the V3 API is really simple. Using our tRusty language, we can define some structs to be serialized to JSON for requests: #[derive(Serialize)] struct CreateRef { r#ref: String, // The name to be used sha: String, // The commit SHA to point to } #[derive(Serialize)] struct CreateFile { message: String, content: String, branch: String, committer: UserRef, } #[derive(Serialize)] struct UserRef { name: String, email: String, } #[derive(Serialize)] struct CreatePR { title: String, head: String, // The branch to be merged base: String, // The target branch for the merge (ie. master) } The basic steps we want to do are described by these: ...

This is actually a static page hosted by GitHub, powered by Jekyll. But how to get a comment section? Give Me Comments Weeeelll…. You could use a service like Disqus. Or, you use the idea from damieng. Jekyll has a neat feature: you can place data files under _data and access in Liquid templates. And that’s more or less the starting point. Add comments as data and render them via Jekyll (utilizing Liquid). ...

If you haven’t yet, check out BASIL. It’s a 24/7 Starcraft league, but for bots! It usually runs fine nowadays. But sometimes an external hiccup occurs. One of those is the problem of detecting who to blame if a game times out. It works fine if the game ends with the in-game timeout of 60min, since the Tournament Module BASIL uses will make both bots leave and select the winner based on the score (That might be unfair, but that’s a topic for another post). ...