Extended Actions in Level Clone War

In my last post I described the new introduced action split. This time I want to continue and show you two other actions, that have been extended for the new level Clone War.

Let's start with the look_around action. In level Greenfields this action gives back a view with radius 1. In level Clone War you can now pass the radius as parameter. The view with radius 2 is shown on right.
As it is a circular view, the corners are missing. For those fields you will get back nil instead of a field.

The action costs are dependent of the view radius. A view with radius 2 will cost 5 action points. The one with radius 1 still costs 2 action points and with radius 0 you will get back your own position for 0.2 action points.

new_population = old_population.split(field)
population.look_around(0) # equal to look_at(0,0)  
population.look_around    # radius 1  
population.look_around(2) # radius 2  

You can also get a single field with look_at and pass the field you want to see as parameter. But you have to make sure this field is within radius 1.

new_population = old_population.split(field)
population.look_at(1,0)  
population.look_at(field)

Also the move_to action has some small changes. The action costs for vertical and horizontal direction remain 6 action points, while moving diagonally now costs 8.5 AP.

For more information see the documentation.

Announcing Level Clone War

The second level for the programming game Zero-X is ready. I'm proud to announce the 2nd level Clone War.

The first level Greenfields introduced basic sensors and actions and showed how to control a single population. With Clone War these sensors and actions will be extended. But we also have a new action, now it is possible to split a population.

Split does two things, first it splits the population into two equal sized populations and then moves the new created population to a field of your choice. Split looks the same as move_to it takes a field or position as parameter for the new population.

new_population = old_population.split(field)
new_population = old_population.split(-1, 0)
new_population = old_population.split(x: 1, y: 1)

As we may have multiple populations now, you need to specify the population you want to apply the action:

population_a.look_around
population_b.move_to 1, 1
population_c.size
population_c.resource

As you can see the new introduced action changes quite a lot. In the next blog post I will describe how some well-known actions have been extended.

For more details see the documentation.