Main Page

From LagoonWiki

1 Welcome to Lagoon
2 ECSLENT
3 Getting Started
4 Documentation on Lagoon
- 4.1 Linux
  - 4.1.1 Distributions
- 4.2 Windows
5 Tutorials
6 Support
7 Work in Progress
8 Humor
9 Entropy
10 Interactive Collaborative GAs
11 Scarab
12 Classroom Management
13 Naval Domain Knowledge
14 Game Class 2009

Welcome to Lagoon

Lagoon is a free open-source component based game engine and can be used as a platform for research and education in artificial and computational intelligence, software engineering, human-computer interaction, and accessibility.

Games pervade our society and culture and provide high fidelity physics and graphics - high fidelity virtual worlds. For fields like AI, where research can be well separated from application, game engines provide a platform for research that is more transferable and applicable to real world problems. Like chess and checkers in the past, 3D Game worlds are the next frontier for AI research. Because we are using genetic algorithms and neural networks (computational intelligence approaches), our game engine has features that are not available in other commercial and research engines. Specifically, Lagoon can run the underlying simulation engine without the graphics - for genetic algorithms and neuroevolution, this means that we can evaluate the fitness of a Game AI without needing graphics or having the graphics component slowing things down. You can, of course, run it with the graphics when you play the game.

This is the Wiki for Lagoon, your source for everything Lagoon. The people at ECSL are busy at work using it and we hope that you too will use it for creating your own games and for your AI research and welcome your contributions. Use the Forums for discussion

ECSLENT

The ECSL ENTity engine, ECSLENT (pronounced Excellent) is our new project. We are building a research game engine on top of python-ogre and OIS. ECSLENT uses psyco for optimizing python and twisted for networking. Like minix, a research operating system, this engine is written to be easily understandable, modifiable, and clean. It is NOT written to be fast. Minix influenced Linux, so let's see how this goes.

ECSLENT can run separate threads for networking, graphics, physics, and AI
ECSLENT separates the simulation (the physics, ai, and networking) from the graphics. This is very useful for evolutionary computation research. I work in genetic algorithms.

Nov 11, 2009. We have a multi-threaded, simple game engine with 2D rigid body physics from the O'Reilly physics book moving ships on water and responding to keyboard and mouse commands to move the camera and control ship heading and speed.

ECSLENT News A devlog and news on progress

HOWTOs links to HOWTOs that describe install python-ogre and ECSLent installation on Ubuntu Linux