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Welcome to StarCraft AI

The StarCraft BroodWar Resource for custom AIs

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This is a collaborative wiki, so please, if you want to contribute send an email to Alberto Uriarte (admin[at]starcraftai.com) with your desired username. Public registration is disabled to avoid spam bots and vandalism.

BWAPI

• BWAPI is a free and open source C++ framework that is used to interact with the popular Real Time Strategy (RTS) game Starcraft: Broodwar.
  • Documentation · Releases · Issue Tracker . BWAPI5 Technical Design (WIP) . BWAPI 4.x.x Technical Overview

BWAPI extensions

• BWME is a terrain analyzer library.
• BWTA2 is a terrain analyzer library.
• BWSAL2 is a project that aims to develop several add-ons.
• SparCraft is an open source StarCraft combat simulation package.
• JarCraft is a SparCraft port in Java using JNIBWAPI
• StarCraft AI Tournament Manager.

Using other programming languages

• Java: BWMirror, JNIBWAPI
• GOAL. An AI language on top of BWAPI, under development by University of Delft, Netherlands.
• Python: CyBW

Other tools

• SSCAIT Tournament Watcher.
• BWDI. Another StarCraft Broodwar interface. Unfinished but with interesting ideas.
• Migration scripts for converting BWAPI 3 source to BWAPI 4 source
• Replay watching enhancement.
• bwheadless. Run broodwar and bwapi on linux without graphics, using wine.

Tutorials

• BWAPI and BWMirror (Java)
• BWAPI Tutorial (C++)
• How to debug a BWAPI AIModule with Visual Studio
• BWAPI Filters
• Getting Started with BWTA2
• Increasing StarCraft Speed
• Multiple instances of StarCraft or how to run multiple bots in the same computer
• Improving mineral gathering rate in Brood War

• For development
  • Visual Studio VC++ 2013 Express is enough.
  • If you want to compile old bots (VS2008 projects) with VS2013. Install the Windows SDK 7.1. Remember you should uninstall first any version of Visual C++ 2010 redistributable, otherwise Windows SDK setup will fail.
• For running BWAPI Bots on non-development machines (e.g Tournaments clients) you only need the VC 2013 Redistributable Package

Research

• Research Papers:
  • A curated list of resources dedicated to StarCraft AI
  • A curated list of research papers on Starcraft BW and Starcraft II
  • A curated list of BWAPI-related Research Papers
• StarCraft AI Benchmarks
• StarCraft Brood War Data Mining
• Learning using SARSA
• A Treatise on the Economy of SCII
• Game Theory with Applications to StarCraft
• Game Theory Applied to Starcraft II
• StarCraft NeuroEvolution Unit AI
• Map analysis

Miscellaneous

• Why not StarCraft 2
• Brood War AI Launcher
• Brood War AI Project - download
• BroodWar unit images as transparent PNGs
• Funny videos
  • Retarded Units of Starcraft BW II
  • Lego StarCraft
  • StarCrafts

Bots

Currently there are 61 bots listed.

27 Terran bots 22 Protoss bots 14 Zerg bots

1 using BWAPI 4.1.2 4 using BWAPI 4.0.1 32 using BWAPI 3.7.4 5 using BWAPI 3.6.1 3 using BWAPI 3.0.3 2 using BWAPI 2.8.0 2 using BWAPI 2.6.1

38 using C++ 10 using Java 2 using C♯ 1 using Clojure

Tournaments

Various venues host remote competitive AI competitions that allow developers from around the world to participate. These venues are often held annually and will sometimes offer prizes to the winners. It is also a great way to test your bot's capabilities.

• SSCAIT: Student StarCraft AI Tournament (games played and streamed all the time, finals take place in Winter)
• AIIDE: AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (part of the program of annual research conference, takes place in Summer)
• CIG: IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (part of the program of annual research conference, takes place in Summer)
• BWAPI Bots Ladder (games played all the time)
• BWAPI mini tournament on iCCup's server with a mix of human and bot players.

StarCraft: Brood War's Mechanics

• Chance to Hit
• Unit Existence/Creation
• Unit Behaviour
• Frame Rate
• Abilities and Bullets
• How does regeneration work?
• How much damage an attack will do to a unit?
• Tricks, Glitches and Exploits
• Exactly how do the custom AI scripts work?
• How does default pathfinding work?
• Attack Animation Frame Data and the IceCC tool's decompilation of the iscript.bin file 'data\scripts\iscript.bin' from the MPQs: Media:iscript_all2.txt.zip (explanation)
• nturley's Unusual Unit Morphs and jaj22's Unusual BW unit transitions
• StarCraft UnitType Data
• StarCraft WeaponType Data
• StarCraft TechType Data
• Latency and latency compensation
• BW order timings data

Map making/editing

• Basics of UMS Mapping
• Guide Map Making
• CHK Format
• Unused Unprotector 2 StarCraft Tool and the source code.
• Scmdraft map editor. Under downloads, you will obtain version 0.8.0, but this is not the latest version. Instead, you will want to look at the news page and get ScmDraft 2 (0.8.1), located in the temp folder.
• Unfortunately, the author did not update the version number in the build, so it incorrectly says 0.8.0, making things quite confusing. You will need this if you want to be able to create Extended Unit Death (EUD) triggers (the Memory condition will be enabled when creating a trigger).
• The downside of using EUDs is that the memory offsets change with every version of StarCraft; I doubt that will be a problem these days though.
• EUD Database, with EUDTrig to find unit offsets. With EUDTrig, you need to copy comctl32.ocx (alternate location) into the current directory. You need ArtMoney for monitoring the process and finding the hex values in the first place. Then, see this exported wiki article.
• Staredit Network's Wiki, and the StarEdit forums. Be sure to change the theme after login, as I find the default one annoying.
• You have 256 switches that you can use to set/reset game state. Death counters are an alternative, and they trigger at a rate of 1 death count = 84 milliseconds.
• Only Players 1 through 8 can own triggers. Neutral (Player 12) cannot, and such triggers will be ignored.
• How to make 4 players share minerals + gas. Lousy resource, but hard to find anything on this.
• It looks like a lot of the good EUD's are patched. EUDEnable. This post clears up exactly what is being read (4 bytes at a time). Many of the tutorials simply assume that all other bytes are 0, which is often incorrect.
• Using Death Count Timers instead of waiting.
• How damage works, such as for burning buildings.
• And overview of working with MPQ archives. Use MPQDraft to patch MPQ files. For reading and editing the contents, use MPQ Editor.
• StarEdit FAQ. StarCraft Mapmaker's Guide.
• StarCraft unit sizes. You can use DatEdit (StarEdit tab) to get the Placement box in pixels. The pixels for a Terran Dropship, for example, are height 37 and width 49. Since scmdraft is zero indexed, be sure to enter your locations for bottom and right as one less than what it actually is. In this example, bottom would be 36 and right would be 48.
• Frequently Asked Questions