Happy New Year everyone!
We have a new software version for you which you can download from:
http://aibirds.org/Software/AngryBirds/abV1.3.zip
The new version contains an improved vision module that can detect real shapes of objects and also the terrain. This is based on Andrew Wang's project work, which we greatly appreciate. You can find Andrew's project report here: http://aibirds.org/Software/AngryBirds/Andrew_Wang_Report.pdf and the slides of his final presentation here: http://aibirds.org/Software/AngryBirds/Andrew_Wang_Final.pdf for some details on how the new vision works.
The new software version offers the previous vision module using minimum bounding boxes as well as a new vision module that detects real shapes. Due to the additional processing required for detecting real shapes, this is obviously slower. You can see the outcome of the vision by using the flags -showReal or showMBR.
Please refer to http://aibirds.org/basic-game-playing-software/getting-started.html for a quick guide on how to use the new version or to the included documentation for more details. If your agent is based on version 1.23 of our software, it should be relatively easy to adjust your agent to the new version. Please be aware that we use a modified data structure to handle real shapes and terrain.
As usual please report any bugs and discuss here on the forum.
And if you haven't heard about it already, the next AIBIRDS competition will be at ECAI 2014, August 18-22 in Prague, Czech Republic. Good luck to everyone! We hope our new software can be used to improve your agents.
Best wishes,
Jochen