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OuterSpatial

This is an implementation of my agent-based economy simulation "OuterSpatial" using SpatialOS. That project served as a prototype for the mechanics underlying the simulation, but ran locally on a single machine which limited its performance (bottlenecking) and fun (single-player only).

This new project aims to rectify both those issues, and the pipe-dream is for this project to be a fully-playable, persistent MMO game based on trading and idle game mechanics.

Speculative road map:

  • Non-spatialOS tick-based prototype
  • Non-spatialOS multithreaded asynchronous prototype
  • Economy mechanics ported to SpatialOS
  • AI behaviour ported and tweaked for SpatialOS
  • Live terminal plotting
  • Primitive TUI
  • Implement human-players with associated UI elements
  • QA testing begins
  • Idle-game gameplay elements

AI traders

An important restriction I wanted to give myself was that the AI actors should have no additional information/assistance other than what human players have. As a result, each AI trader is completely independent and bases all of its decisions entirely on:

  • Its own inventory & liquidity
  • Its own personal understanding of a commodities' "worth"
  • The current price of a commodity
  • It's remembered history of how its previous trades have done

SpatialOS Quick start

The build scripts (build.json) for each worker:

  1. Generate C++ code from schema
  2. Download the C++ worker SDK
  3. Create a cmake_build directory in the worker directory
  4. Invoke cmake with arguments depending on the target platform

To build and launch a local deployment execute the following commands:

spatial worker build
spatial local launch --runtime_version=15.0.0

Windows users

If you have WSL installed, it is strongly recommended that you invoke spatial worker build directly from a non-WSL bash shell, e.g. git bash. The command executes shell scripts internally, which are likely to fail when invoked from other types of shells (e.g. cmder, powershell). Try this if you see the $'\r': command not found error, or the cmake command not getting found despite being installed.

To connect a new instance of the "External" worker type to a running local deployment (after spatial local launch):

spatial local worker launch External local

What the project does

When you launch a deployment, a single instance of the Managed worker will be started as configured in default_launch.json.

The Managed worker connects to SpatialOS and then assigns the entity with ID 2 (defined in the snapshot) as a partition entity to itself. This then gives it authority over the LoginListenerSet and PositionSet on entity 1, as per the authority delegation already set up on it in the snapshot.

The Managed worker updates the position of entity 1 in a loop, making it move around the origin in a circle - this will be visible from the inspector.

The Interest component on entity 1 is configured such that the Managed worker gains interest in all other entity with the improbable::restricted::Worker component. The Managed worker uses this detect when new workers connect to the deployment and log a message to the runtime for each connected worker.

The External worker, once manually started, simply connects to SpatialOS and then loops to continually process the Ops list it receives.

Project structure

The CMake project hierarchy doesn't exactly match the directory structure of the project. For example the projects for workers add as subdirectories the schema and dependencies projects.

This is how projects are structured in the directory:

+-- schema/CMakeLists.txt
+-- dependencies/CMakeLists.txt
+-- workers
    |-- External/
    |   |-- External/CMakeLists.txt
    |   |-- CMakeLists.txt
    |   |-- build.json
    |-- Managed/
        |-- Managed/CMakeLists.txt
        |-- CMakeLists.txt
        |-- build.json

This enables you to keep the worker directories free of CMake files for schema and dependencies while not needing a CMake file at the root of the project.

The schema directory contains a sample empty component called blank. It is not used by the workers directly so feel free to delete it but it's there to show how sources generated from the schema could be linked in the worker binary. See schema/CMakeLists.txt which creates a library with all generated sources.

The snapshot exists in both JSON and binary format in the snapshots folder. There is no script to generate the snapshot as the snapshot was written by hand in JSON format, but it's possible to make simple changes to the JSON snapshot and regenerate the binary snapshot from it. To update the binary snapshot after making a change, run the following command:

spatial project history snapshot convert --input-format=text --input=snapshots/default.json --output-format=binary --output=snapshots/default.snapshot

The worker project

The following applies to both the Managed and External worker projects but examples will only be about Managed.

After running spatial build the generated project by CMake will be in workers/Managed/cmake_build. Exactly what it contains will depend on the generator you use. A worker project includes 3 subdirectories in its CMakeLists.txt - dependencies, schema and Managed. The first two are not true subdirectories of workers/Managed in the file structure but their binary directories are set as if they were.

On Windows, both the release and debug builds of the Worker SDK are downloaded and set up correctly in the CMakeLists.txt. This means that both the Release and Debug configurations in the generated Visual Studio solution (.sln) should build and link correctly without any further changes.

Attaching a debugger

If you use a Visual Studio generator with CMake, the generated solution contains several projects to match the build targets. You can start a worker from Visual Studio by setting the project matching the worker name as the startup project for the solution. It will try to connect to a local deployment by default. You can customize the connection parameters by navigating to Properties > Configuration properties > Debugging to set the command arguments. Using receptionist localhost 7777 DebugWorker as the command arguments for example will connect a new instance of the worker named DebugWorker via the receptionist to a local running deployment. You can do this for both worker types that come with this project. Make sure you are starting the project using a local debugger (e.g. Local Windows Debugger).

Cloud deployment

Our cloud deployment environment is based on Linux, so therefore if you're not using Linux, you'll have to set up a cross-compile toolchain and build out a Linux binary (due to the nature of C++). More information can be found here.

If using Windows, options include (but are not limited to):

Once this is done and you have successfully built a Linux assembly, set the project_name field in spatialos.json to match your SpatialOS project name. Then upload and launch:

spatial cloud upload <assembly-name>
spatial cloud launch <assembly-name> default_launch.json <deployment-name> --snapshot=<snapshot-path> --runtime_version=15.0.0

See spatial cloud connect external if you want to connect to a cloud deployment. In addition, the External worker has a second external launch configuration called cloud which could be used to connect provided that you know the deployment name and have a login token:

spatial local worker launch External cloud <deployment-name> <login-token>