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MS TextWorld: open-source engine that both generates and simulates text games
- cwyers 8y ago> TextWorld requires Python 3 and only supports Linux and macOS systems at the moment. Truly, this is a new Microsoft.
- benj111 8y agoIndeed, I thought the MS was referring to something else, just based on the title. Of course they may want to be targeting Linux and MacOS for nefarious purposes, or maybe its a peace offering to make up for skype?
- verst 8y agoProbably works with Python3 in WSL (let's say Ubuntu). That's good enough for Windows support right? ;) Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft on Python, linux and container things. This however is just my personal opinion and I'm not affiliated with this project.
- pault 8y agoI have to use Windows at work after ten years of development exclusively on Mac and Linux. Once I set up wsl at work I found that almost all of my gripes about developing on Windows were gone and a month ago I switched my home office to Windows. If you had told me two years ago that I'd be using Windows full time as a Dev environment I would have asked you what were you smoking and can I have some. I have to say though, the first time I started up my "pro" operating system and saw an ad for Candy crush in my start menu I almost bailed.
- escapecharacter 8y agoWhat program do you use for command line work? I’ve found Powershell and Cmder clunky compared to macOS terminal and any Ubuntu terminal.
- coldacid 8y agoPSCore isn't bad so long as you don't load it down with Powershell modules. It only takes two or three beyond the built-ins to make it start crawling.
- falcor84 8y agoI personally am very satisfied with ConEmu, launching Ubuntu 18.04's bash under WSL. My only gripe is with how messy it is to set up arrow keys to work in vim, and the solution I found doesn't work over ssh. EDIT: just to preempt suggestions that I should just use the home-row, I am, but it's really annoying for those of us not using qwerty (Colemak in my case).
- daeken 8y agoI run an OpenSSH server inside WSL and then connect with Putty. It works perfectly, it's fast as hell, and it's super simple; it's just like connecting to any other box, really.
- bashinator 8y agoI’m using gnome-terminal running in VcXsrv. The scrolling and font rendering is far better than any of the windows terninal apps I’ve tried.
- tracker1 8y agoHyper for bash, powershell ise for ps (really limited)
- karate-fu 8y agoWSLtty is the only viable one if you ask me with Vim running a tad slow, but acceptable. Alacritty might soon overtake it.
- gcb0 8y agolatelly the only way I can touch windows is with the shell from git-for-windows. it is surprisingly excellent.
- verst 8y agoFor anyone using Docker I created an image for convenience. https://hub.docker.com/r/berndverst/mstextworld https://hub.docker.com/r/berndverst/mstextworld Source at: https://github.com/berndverst/mstextworld/ https://github.com/berndverst/mstextworld/
- freeone3000 8y agoI work on this project. We needed to pull in a few ways of running the backend game and communicating with it that weren't quite convenient on Windows. A number of integrated third-party components related to generating and running IF games are either linux-only or behave differently in windows and linux. In addition, the target audience is reinforcement learning researchers, who overwhelmingly use Python on Linux, so that focus was prioritized. Ubuntu on WSL actually is a test platform, and guided a few technical decisions (in part, WSL issues #902 and #162 narrowed what we could do). Honestly, that comment is not too far from the mark. :)
- hanniabu 8y agoJust goes to show how shitty Windows is. Impossible to program anything on Windows without it taking 5x as long.
- 4thaccount 8y agoYes and No. I think they understand the very real limitations of Windows and how developers and power users hate it. Let's compare and contrast the two. Linux has a usable shell that has GCC, Bash, Awk, dozens of specific commands that can be piped together, Perl, Python, TCL...etc all built-in and easily composable. Windows has well...CMD which is horrible, Batch files, VBScript (deprecated), VBA, and Powershell (a mess). If you install Visual Studio Tools you can get a C++ compiler and .NET languages like C# and VB.NET. Linux might have its faults, but the design is coherant and you can get stuff done. With Windows your only options are use a GUI or write at least a 1/2 page of code for something that is a oneliner in Linux. Powershell is a sometimes great (mostly meh) attempt to right this, but the everything is an object design is just simply more complex than the Unix philosophy of strings, pipes, and interoperable pieces. It seems like the Windows approach is to recognize the failing, while keeping in mind that a lot of desktop software uses Windows. So give developers Linux via WSL and people can still run their other Windows only software without Wine.
- userbinator 8y agoI am a developer (Win32; actually started with Win16 and DOS before that) and consider myself a "power user" of Windows, yet never had the feeling you describe. True, the -nix world has a great CLI shell, and some things are much easier there, but on the other hand, the GUI experience is (or at least used to be...) incomparable. AFAIK tiny single-exe-file no-install portable GUI applications just don't exist in the -nix world. I agree that PowersHell is a mess --- I tend to stay away from it and use CMD instead. In this particular case, it is very strange that they claim something which appears like it shouldn't be OS-dependent at all (Python is supposed to be portable, and there's no GUI stuff) would require a specific OS. A new Microsoft indeed, but unfortunately not one I'm a fan of...
- 4thaccount 8y agoYou can certainly create GUI apps on Linux, but I've never found the need or desire as the terminal works so well. Even with a GUI designer, it adds a bunch of code you wouldn't likely need if you had a decent environment. Of course if your app is for non technical folks, I sympathize and understand.
- Maimedpuppet 8y agoThey won a text adventure AI competition as well [1][2] and is now running their own with $2000 reward at stake [3]. Getting an agent to solve unseen RPG games like zork or modern games like Zelda and Witcher would be awesome and seriously impressive, but I don't think anybody is even close to that right now. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04259 https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04259 [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/nail_agent https://github.com/Microsoft/nail_agent [3] http://aka.ms/textworld-challenge http://aka.ms/textworld-challenge
- PaulHoule 8y agoI dunno, I was thinking about making a bot that could beat Hyperdimension Neptunia...
- coldacid 8y agoDo it. Please.
- chongli 8y agoI would be genuinely surprised if anyone can build an agent that can solve Zelda for the NES without any foreknowledge of the game. So much of that game is bound up in the human cultural tropes associated with the monomyth. To finish the game you need to have at least a basic working knowledge of what it means to be a hero. There is no obvious, short-term indicator of progress the way there is in Mario (increase the x position to win). The process of obtaining just a single piece of the Triforce (the primary indicator of progress) is so complicated that you'll essentially never see it happen with random button-pressing. So any agent attempting to play and win Zelda is going to need to develop its own model of the game world and try to understand things that way. I don't see how that is supposed to happen though, without any context.
- wholemoley 8y agoAs I mentioned in the other post, the curiosity bots can help with this. They're rewarded by exploring, not by values in game. Maybe alone they're not enough, but in conjunction with other things, I bet we could beat Zelda. I had the bot exploring enough to find the first dungeon of LoZ.
- zyngaro 8y agoAmazing! Yesterday while taking a walk I thought exactly about that ! A text based game and a text game engine.
- ucaetano 8y agoIs this Microsoft's response to Google's Stadia?
- tellarin 8y agoMicrosoft's approach would likely be xCloud. https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18263405/microsoft-xcloud-game-streaming-demo-video https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18263405/microsoft-xcloud...
- ninju 8y agoNope...this has do with quickly creating "worlds" that can been used for generating training sets on AI systems that process text input
- rainydaybook 8y agoWhy not show a simple map of the room you're in, at least? It's a fairly simple change, but would make the orientation in space and remembering of location and few previous locations much more intuitive.
- taodav 8y agoTextWorld environments have a render function that renders an SVG of the room and your inventory (https://github.com/Microsoft/TextWorld#extras https://github.com/Microsoft/TextWorld#extras)
- marccote19 8y agoAlso, those games are intended for Reinforcement Learning agents, not Humans.
- wuschel 8y agoWhat is the difference between TextWorld and a design system for interactive fiction games like Inform [1]? It seems to be that the former has natural language processing/semantics integrated, while the latter relies on a rather old school approach to text-based games. Or am I mistaken? [1] http://inform7.com/ http://inform7.com/
- 4thaccount 8y agoI was wondering the same thing
- taodav 8y agoThe main addition is the ability to randomly generate text-based games and a gym-like interface that the RL community is used to. TextWorld was originally (not sure if it is anymore) based on inform7!
- marccote19 8y agoHi, I'm with the TextWorld team. TextWorld actually uses Inform7. The framework first builds a game object (e.g. objects, locations, quests) according to some settings. Then, it converts it into Inform7 code before being compiled into a playable game. See https://imgur.com/oOcy5kk https://imgur.com/oOcy5kk
- malloryerik 8y agoHow could you run a TextWorld game in a web browser? Use a Glulx file interpreter like Quixe? https://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/ https://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/
- yorwba 8y agoThe "try it" example on the TextWorld page uses Parchment: https://github.com/curiousdannii/parchment https://github.com/curiousdannii/parchment
- macca321 8y agoThere are interesting parallels between problem solving textworld agents and smart hypermedia client agents.