 So please everyone, just one word, this will be the lightning talk session if any of you wants to join and talk about please or her project for a couple of minutes, that's the last call because we will be starting very shortly with the first presentation about Athena project right now. We have currently five lightning talks so if you want to join, please keep your talk shorter than let's say 8 to 10 minutes maximum. So reach me if you have something for us and also enjoy the lightning talks in a few minutes. And do you have her remote for that far? And the what? I don't have it. Ah wait, I'm sure it won't. Okay, hello. So I come from a new project and we call the project Athena. There we have a bit of confusion with Intel but we're not from Intel, just to clarify. We've had a couple complaints about it. Doesn't work. So what is it? So it's a virtual world similar to Second Life or VRChat. It was created by the company, High Fidelity, was started by Philip Rovesdale who created Second Life originally and after he left Second Life he went on to create a new world which he called High Fidelity. Kind of the idea of that is that what's High Fidelity representation of reality kind of understanding. It's not about audio. So the commercial project is almost entirely open source. In that there are just a couple bits missing. There's an audio codec which we've already replaced and there are central services which manage user accounts but are pretty trivial and actually optional. So that's not that we could deal. It died unfortunately a couple weeks ago mostly because of management reasons. I think the technology is actually quite promising but they didn't really have much of a business model and had trouble finding users. In some ways the very attractive to me nature of the project works against business interests because it's extremely distributed, extremely open and so you can't really make anybody pay any money for it. I'm not quite sure how he convinced people to give him money for that but we're very lucky so we're not going to say no to it. So once it died we've picked it up, we've mirrored all the documentation, all the content that there was and we are continuing development. So what is it? It's a fully distributed, scalable virtual world. What do I mean by that? You can run your own server anywhere like Linote or any other provider. Each server itself is composed of different pieces like for instance the audio mixer which is an environment with an audio chat. So you can actually run the audio on its own server if you want to distribute it all. Even the physics is distributed in that actually the server hands out pieces of the world to simulate to clients. It's a quite interesting idea that I'm not sure is entirely stable but well it's there. It supports Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. There is experimental support for the Quest and for Android but it's not entirely stable yet, it still needs work. It runs on Windows, Linux and OS X of course and it's written in modern C++ and scriptable in JavaScript so it's actually quite convenient. If anybody here worked with Second Life for instance it's much, much better in that regard. Second Life is a huge pain to live all for. So since this is a gaming subject here, what's the gaming potential? Well, it's a 3D engine with VR, scripting, voice chat and networking. You can set up your infrastructure. It's not a centralized thing so you can just host it yourself and do whatever you want. Everything can be scripted including the UI and well it's not in itself a gaming engine. It's more a social world in which you can make games. So think for instance creating games in Second Life or in Minecraft. The idea is that you have an existing world in which you already have users and you are just kind of adding games on top of that because well you already have your virtual neighbors or whatever and you want to play chess with them or you could make certainly something more complicated. Right, so I'm going to show you a couple very short videos about what it looks like. Have in mind we, most of us are developers who are into graphics artists so actually the project has had some trouble attracting artists due to its very open nature in that in Second Life artists can control very well their creations, their distribution and their usage. Here it doesn't work like that. Philip Rosedale wanted to create the kind of web browser of VR in that it's pretty much like trying to protect images on a web page. You can just copy it. Assets are loaded over HTTP. So here's a VR point of view. We have this tablet kind of thing with which you can manage the entire interface. It needs some work but well it does everything. I mean you can use the entire functionality from there, get into the debug menus so it's quite complete in that regard. One piece of functionality that I quite like is that there is the concept of zones. What are those? You can define parts of the world in which the environment changes. So for instance one thing that I found very lacking in Second Life in that you can create a dark basement in there because the world has global lighting and that's always the same. Under the high fidelity technology you can just define a chunk of the world which changes how the environment is lit. It's going to look again and you should see again. See? Here it changes. This is a kind of development kind of environment. It's not very pretty. And we have a bunch of other random things like for instance, of course we can have non-human avatars. We can have flexible geometry which you can actually touch and interact with. And you can animate your avatars in that you build a skeleton in Blender. One member of our community actually created a great plugin for rigging avatars and converting avatars content to be compatible with our world. It's very convenient in that way. So we have a small team and quite a few contributors already. We started a couple months ago more or less because we've been always slowed down by the main company in that it wasn't very good to work with as an open source project. It was hard to make contributions. We moved much faster so actually when it died we actually started getting more stuff done. Several of the ex-employees of the company actually worked with us. I actually just wanted to add that it's actually been used commercially. There's actually a children's TV show I think in Italy that actually uses this technology. They actually use render part of it in VR. If anybody is interested, I can show you later. Right, so why are we here? Well, we're mostly getting started still in that the project died quite recently. The shutdown was announced a bit more than a month ago. So we've been working very hard on getting a release process, replacing closed parts with open source code and just getting a better feel for the code base and working as a good team. So we still need more people and specifically we don't have currently an OSX developer which will be very good. Android is also kind of post right now but it works. We have C++ developers but always could use more certainly. It's a very large project and of course 3D artists since it's a 3D world Well, it's not going to show anything if we don't have any content. Right, so here's our website. We mainly communicate while discord. If you're interested in this at all, you should definitely join it because this is a very kind of yearly part of talk on our part. We're still getting used to this. The main code base has been around for a long time so it's not completely broken or anything but still you might run into some sort of minor trouble so definitely come to us and ask about it. We have in-world meetings if you actually install the client. We're going to have a bunch of meetings soon. We have a bunch of developer community meetings. This is a kind of a philosophical sort of discussion. We actually have a professional that set up shop in our little world and talks about philosophical topics. And today we even have a bar trivia competition if you want to use some kind of random fun and socialize with the people that are there. And that's it. Thank you. By the way, if anybody wants a bookmark, a physical one, I have cards. Thank you. Okay. Hello, I'm Jan Ciasul from Costa Rica. I'm coming from an open source organization called Spacebeam. We are organizing a side event for FOSDEM which is a StarCraft Root War AI tournament, bots for bots. In our group we see StarCraft as a good test bet for artificial intelligence research because the uncertainty that the game has in chess or go, both players have access to the work. Both can see what the action of the other player is. StarCraft is completely different. We have been seeing, in this scene, this is a scene with 10 years of continuous tournaments and continuous work for companies that come and go. We can talk about, or we have bots made from Samsung. We have bots made from Facebook, just for mention two of the biggest companies. But we have been seeing participation, maybe not in tournaments, but on the research aspect of other colorful names from industry. Currently, the state of affairs in the aspect of competition was that only Windows bots can compete. That's kind of a shame. We built this competition in order to enable support for everyone using Linux and everyone using other languages. The idea is to be more inclusive about the tools that you can use to build the thing. We have support for a project called TorchCraft built by Facebook. With that we have access to the PyTorch ecosystem. We built this tournament. We have 12 bots registered, 11 submitted at the end. This is the conference where I was in theory coming here to present the results. But for technical issues, the tournament haven't started yet. I'm here to give you my face to the people that register and say I'm sorry, but we are actually going to have a tournament. It's running as soon as we fix the technical issues with our container system. We are developing everything from scratch because there are actually solutions for running bot versus bot competitions using Docker, but Docker don't have really good support for the GPU. So if you want to train machine learning models that have good access to the GPU, that don't require a demon running with root in your system, for that we use Singularity, the container solution for our environment. To be kind of specific, our tournament manager died when we started a 31 container because we have an IP issue that we need to fix, but that's my blocker on the technical side. But what we plan to do, my community, what we plan to organize is like an event that is like a side event for FOSDM and use hopefully this game development room every year or the FOSDM event every year to let you know about our community, to invite you to participate, to invite you to, of course, not only build bots for Windows, to have the tool and the power that the Linux ecosystem with all these languages and the kernel that we all use a lot for this kind of endeavors. That's what I'm coming from. We plan to make this an annual event. This is the first time that we are organizing it. We are having a rough start, but we are compromised with this idea that use StarCraft GoodWare as the sandbox that it is to test the development of new algorithms and make progress on the field. So that's it from my side. I hope that this kind of thing interests you and if you want to learn how to make bots and compete or you want to learn a little bit more about the scene, actually we are like four bot developers right here in this room. So if you have questions, you can ask me on the hallway. That's it. So thank you. Thank you. The next one, it's open console. Now StarCraft on the front. The person here will be more allowed to make an ad for StarCraft. Young next time, I think. Yeah. Just have a few pictures. Just like what they are trying to do with us, I think it's a nice environment. I think we can add it some more. Maybe. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. Oh, I'm not. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. This is just for recording, right? Yeah, just for this. Okay. Any idea? Any idea why this might not be working? Where is our problem? Okay. Everything seems to be in order. Maybe try a USB or something. Sorry. It's my left of the thing. It's an USB open. So I'm not sure. Oh, thank you. Okay. Can I start? Yes. Hello, everybody. My talk is introduction to StarCraft AI. And I just realized that we should have switched up the order of presentations with Jan Cessu. So I don't know how many of you are into StarCraft. As you can see by my shirt, I'm very much into it. And I'm not counting the answers, but it's not enough. So we have this thing called Student StarCraft AI tournament. This is very interesting. We have this thing called Student StarCraft AI tournament. This is where it all began. And don't let the word student confuse you. This is a tournament which is a yearly bot versus bot tournament. That means that people code up their AIs that play Brood War. And these AIs have a tournament. And someone wins mostly bragging rights. So this is the page. And the bots are programmed in C++ or Java using something called the Brood War API. The Brood War API kind of emulates the cause and the ways that humans interact with the game. And there are also always debates how much control we should give to bots. But pretty much a bot can do everything a human can do and not more. And obviously some things are working differently. We are directly issuing comments to the game engine. So it's basically a hack inside StarCraft. The bots are not seeing the screen. I guess many of you have seen Alpha Star performing. That's completely different. This is Brood War. This is not SC2. That's not to say that SC2 AI is a bad thing or you shouldn't pursue it. I mean, they are people too. But this is better. This is Far Predates Alpha Star. It's about 2010 when it first started. And there is a live stream also. Sorry for the bad potato quality, but I didn't want to take up too much bandwidth for showing 10 seconds of game. So these gender bots are AIs by Haupen. And actually ADS is the AI written by the Samsung team, which won some tournaments. I don't know exactly which ones, but it's a quite advanced one. And that's enough. You can watch it anytime because it's a 24-7 stream. And there is a YouTube channel as well. There is a weekly broadcast basically. Now it's the tournament stage. There is a yearly tournament and there is an ongoing competition. And later you can watch the reports casted by some very good casters and also me. So yeah, that's it. What I want to also show you, it's something called OpenBW, where some talented developers or much like Crazy Fanatics, reverse engineer the whole StarCraft Brood War engine, and it is available to you on GitHub. Now what I want to show you, it's basically one file. So it is quite hard to decipher it and we don't really need to use it. The BW API or Brood War API is a self-contained package. But you can look inside the code of the OpenBW and it's functionally identical to StarCraft itself. So much so that even the bugs and quirks are reproduced. So there is also, you think I'm joking, but it is necessary to emulate the level of play. So you can do like the extractor trick if you know what that is basically tricking the game into overusing your supply in the game and who doesn't play StarCraft now have no idea what I'm talking about. So regarding competitions, there is the yearly students StarCraft AI tournament and there is something called AEWIDE and it stands for Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment. Yeah, this is an AI conference, very prestigious, some smart people say smart things there and sometimes we get in and there is the student StarCraft, not student, but StarCraft AI competition which is organized by the same crew. So if you write about it, you can talk about it and also you win some bragging rights within AI circles with this I like to think. So that is the brief overview. There are some other competitions going on mostly yearly or yeah, I think they are yearly. For example, the conference of games organized by I don't know which university in South Korea and there has been serious AI research going on in the area of StarCraft. Samsung and Facebook had some teams who competed and wrote about and quite graciously developed some frameworks that we can use. I'd like to comment Facebook on this. I know Facebook is a company you might have opinions about them but the tools that are provided by them freely and accessible for everyone are good in this particular scene. That's not a judgment of the company itself. Let's skip that. So about me, I skipped the introduction in the middle of the talk. My name is Chonko. My background is an enterprise job developer. I mostly work with banking and loyalty systems and no one fucking cares because this is not LinkedIn. And I have a site called Making Computer Do Things. The name is someone asked to please describe in simple words what you do. So yeah, I make computer do things. And I view myself as an unsolicited community ambassador for this whole community. I basically make them talk when they don't want to. And there is some things I do in this site. And first of all, when I started out, I wrote about myself. And it's called Jumpy Dogo Bot because I have a way of naming things. And you see this is a 30-part basically guide and developing some good code and of course a lot of memes. So basically let me just grasp into it and memes, bad code and Java. What more you need. And this has 30 parts. There is the Undermind Podcast. Play on the Overmind. Again, if you're not into StarCraft, you don't know what is that. That's my shirt as well. And there I view, not interview, interview both authors, developers, and anyone interested in the scene and some not interesting people, I'm sure. So recently I started to branch out into more StarCrafty things, presented this scene more to gamers as well. And the latest episode I had an interview with Freakling, a famous StarCraft map designer. So everything that can be possibly related to the Brood War AI scene, but it is mostly about Brood War AI and talking with members of the community and basically having fun. At least I do. And I abuse them verbally. And that's it. Another project I do. It's called the StarCraft Human and AI League. And yeah, this website I threw together in 10 minutes. So I'm very sorry for that. And this StarCraft Human and AI League. Basically, if you want to play against these bots, then you have to download something called Drop Launcher, which is kind of very much outdated. And you have to import some files and it's not working. You have to look it up in the Internet. And this is the step when all the gamers just leave the room and if you're not a developer, you don't have that kind of endurance to tinkering with things. So my project is, it's schnell.com. Schnell with this, I guess. And it's a tool. It's a persistent online platform for you to play against Brood War AI. So you just load it up and click on a bot, a map, and your race. And there you go. There is an introductory video. I will not play it because we don't really have the time. But that is something that you should check out. Unfortunately, it's not public yet because I don't have infinite time. It is just entering the beta stage. I must commend that the community is helping me a lot with this. And I have a lot of health testing and solving technical problems. Also, the few words about the community. In the students' talk of the AI tournament page, there is a link for our Discord. Please join us. Please interact with us. You can bring your memes as well. And the community is usually people who played Brood War back in the day. So that means we are kind of older and thusly more experienced and more experienced in development. Have more development experience. That's not a judgment in any way, shape, or form. It's just a statement. So basically, we can and we are coding and dissecting and cancel everything. You can interact with people generally in AI research circles as well. One of the guys I'd like to mention is David Churchill, an AI researcher in the University of Alberta who is organizing the aid conference tournament as well. And, yeah, if you want to learn coding, I guess most of you know something about coding by now. But if you want to learn coding, learn Brood War, development, or sharpen your skills, it is a good place because we love to solve problems and we love to go into the nitty-gritty details. Like I presented, there is a guy who decompiled the Starkov engine. So that's the level of engagement you could expect from us. And I also have some online presence as well. This is my YouTube channel also making computer do things. Everything is called that. I have YouTube Twitch and the site. And here, there is a live AI coding stream. The point of this is we made an AI that can beat the stock AI sometimes if the moon is right in three hours. So it's not that hard. It's not that hard you can get into it. Writing some basic bot is certainly achievable in a human timeframe, but maybe writing a good bot now takes a lot of time. Currently, the supported frameworks are C++ Java, meaning technically any GVM-based language can be used. And one of the top bots, Purple Wave, is written in Scala. And that's actually a guy named Dan Gent who wrote it with a Facebook AI researcher. So I'm just name-dropping here to be more famous or something. So yeah, he's a good guy. So this is three hours and 19 minutes. That's about half an hour of silliness, I think. So yeah, you can do that. And finally, regarding presenting this scene to gamers and talking about the snail project, I was recently on something called the Pylon Show. You might have heard about it if you're into startup. This slide is like 90% bragging and 10% actual information, but go watch it. And there is also Netorot, aka Antiga, who is a community organizer in this. And I think this is all the surface-level stuff I wanted to say about this. Yet again, it would have benefited us to switch the order of this presentation and TorchUp. TorchUp is another language we kind of support. It's Python and we want to extend to a lot of languages if that is possible. The BWAPI team is working on that. And eventually, it will get done. Thank you very much. Let's all come in. He's on your pocket or a belt? I think you're ready to go. He's sharing your resume. What? Yeah, we'll walk it out. Okay. Two other people started working on it again and they're hitting it off and seeing their commit messages and it's like a youth thing and they're writing the Lex area, which is almost complete. Well, here was one of my first commits. Can I walk again? I'll stand here. I was really powdery. It's shown or after the image is shown or something happens. Thank you. And that's when it's using lingo. And one of the things was we get an argument but here was this or if there was an argument and lingo was an easy language to use to read. You could say beep and beep but you also could say beep one or beep 100. So even a simple beep function has a little bit of logic to check okay, is there a function or not or is there a parameter? And yeah, it's cool to work on small things and actually see the progress and progress and I hope that someday in like, I don't know the time frame but we'll get to replay my safe cracker game with everything implemented. Yes, that was it. I mean, I would love for more people to join. I mean, it can be humbling. It's hard to start something fresh and in a project where everybody is already more developed knows everything and you're starting anew but yeah, if you want to work on a game engine with we end up playable games, go check Scam out and see if you can work with us. All right?