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![[image loading]](http://www.openbw.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/OpenBW_Header.png)
TABLE OF CONTENTS: INTRODUCTION REPLAY VIEWER OPENBW HD BW AI IDE FAQ
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INTRODUCTION
VISION
OpenBW aims at bringing the greatest game of all time to a new generation of gamers and developers, at a higher level than ever seen before. While OpenBW contains a new game engine, it is fully compatible with Brood War by Blizzard.
OpenBW is developed entirely by us. We own the copyrights of our work and we do not violate copyrights of other parties. In particular, OpenBW does not contain any IP (intellectual property) owned by Blizzard.
Although the entire project is a volunteering effort by unpaid contributors the team and project setup matches professional equivalents and we set high standards of quality. In our view, this is the key to our success and acceptance by you.
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INTRODUCTION BY TSCMOO
copied from tscmoos blog post at: www.openbw.com/hello-world/
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On December 08 2016 04:05 tscmoo wrote:
Hi. I’m the developer of the game engine for OpenBW. I’ve been writing a bot/AI for StarCraft: Brood War for a while now, and I started the OpenBW project because working with the original game for purposes of machine learning or running automated games is quite difficult. The existing solutions scale poorly and are not portable. I also really wanted to watch replays in the browser, so I figured I would recreate the game engine.
OpenBW is still in the early stages, and the scope has grown a little, but my main responsibility is the core game engine, and the most important goal is full compatibility with StarCraft: Brood War.
The game engine is almost the entire game. It is how units move, prod and poke each other, how they bug out and struggle with pathfinding, how they live and how they die. It is not things like the user interface, graphics or sound, but don’t worry, we’ll have that too. At some point you’ll be able to play it, there will be networking and whatnot. But not yet.
The first focus of the project is to be able to view replays. Replays are a nice focus since in order to play a replay, the entire game engine is required. From the perspective of the code, viewing a replay is almost the same thing as actually playing the game, the difference is just that the user input comes from a file instead of from a mouse and keyboard.
The required accuracy and faithfulness to the original game can not be overstated. The engine is large, and if anything is off by the slightest margin, the entire game will go out of sync. By out of sync I simply mean that something different would happen if you were to play a game in OpenBW vs the original StarCraft. There is a butterfly effect that happens when something is done incorrectly which creates enormous differences. Therefore, the original behavior needs to be replicated exactly.
The engine will be a library which can be used in other projects. There is no API yet, it is too early to be used for that purpose.
There are no ETAs (at least not from me). Features will be done when they’re done.
We have a demo replay viewer that you can use to view a replay in the browser. In order to draw the graphics it requires some files from StarCraft: Brood War, so you must have that installed locally (with the 1.16.1 patch).
Please read the instructions on how to use the replay viewer here.
The replay viewer itself can be found here.
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ANNOUNCEMENTS
BW AI IDE
Introducing the Broodwar Artificial Intelligence Integrated Development Environment (BW AI IDE) as a separate module.
Archive: + Show Spoiler +
Graphs
Introducing graphs. Press '5' to see various data over time (e.g. current minerals / gas).
Sound Support
The replay viewer now supports sound. Set the volume via slider or mute / unmute via click on the sound icon.
Protoss arrived
You can now watch 1v1 melee games of all three races, brought to you by tscmoo.
http://www.openbw.com/protoss-too/
quuad takes BW HD lead
quuad is taking over the lead for the BW HD module. We are very excited to have quuad in charge of BW HD. Not only is he immensely talented, but he also brought his own supply:
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![[image loading]](http://www.openbw.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/SupplyDepot_WIP.png)
Social Media
We're now present on Twitter, Youtube, Reddit.
Of course you can always visit our forum to discuss anything related to OpenBW.
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REPLAY VIEWER
![[image loading]](http://www.openbw.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/demo_button.png)
Want the replay viewer integrated with bwreplays.com? Vote for it here.
SCREENSHOTS
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MAIN SCREEN
(click image to view in full size)
![[image loading]](http://www.openbw.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/replay_viewer_screenshot.jpg)
INFORMATION TABS
![[image loading]](http://www.openbw.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/production_tab.png)
![[image loading]](http://www.openbw.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/army_tab.png)
![[image loading]](http://www.openbw.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/upgrades_tab.png)
![[image loading]](http://www.openbw.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/research_tab.png)
GRAPH TAB
![[image loading]](http://www.openbw.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/info_graph.png)
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Short OpenBW Replay Viewer Tutorial by Xloctis: + Show Spoiler +
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FEATURES
Some features you might have missed in the original replay viewer:
- Set replay speed from as low as you want up to 1024x original speed
- press '1' to show / hide the production tab. Drag it anywhere on your browser window.
- press '2' to show / hide the army composition tab
- press '3' to show / hide the upgrades tab
- press '4' to show / hide the research tab
- press '5' to show / hide the graphs tab (and click on legend icons to toggle individual data lines)
- Rewind to any point in the replay using the slider handle
- Just missed some action? Rewind 10 seconds by simply hitting the 'backspace' key
- Slick info bar shows you the basic information you expect from a modern replay tool
- Just drag and drop a replay file into the browser window to view it
- Press 'h' to see a list of all available controls
- The viewport adjusts to your browser window size
You can also right-click-drag to move the screen or select units to view their health bar.
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SUBPROJECT UPDATES
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Tuesday, Mar 21 12:33am GMT (GMT+00:00)
Added graphs.
Tuesday, Jan 24 3:45am GMT (GMT+00:00)
The replay viewer now supports sound.
Tuesday, Jan 10 1:03am GMT (GMT+00:00)
Added support for Protoss
Tuesday, Jan 03 5:11am GMT (GMT+00:00)
Added upgrades tab and research tab
Saturday, Dec 31 5:31am GMT (GMT+00:00)
Added unit selection and health bars
Wednesday, Dec 21 11:41pm GMT (GMT+00:00)
Added support for Zerg race
Tuesday, Dec 20 1:55am GMT (GMT+00:00)
Added army composition tab
Saturday, Dec 17 7:21pm GMT (GMT+00:00)
Added draggable production tab
Tuesday, Dec 13 5:17pm GMT (GMT+00:00)
Added support for the SSCAIT tournament: http://www.openbw.com/sscait-listings/
Browse recent replays and watch them seamlessly in your browser.
Also: no need to specify the MPQ file locations more than once anymore. They are now cached.
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REPORTING BUGS
We would really appreciate your time and effort in letting us know of any problems you may experience with OpenBW. By letting us know you can help us improve the project! Please follow the process outlined below when reporting bugs.
Process:+ Show Spoiler +
There are basically three types of issues:
1. You cannot watch a replay (e.g. "fatal error: decompression failed" or similar)
2. You can watch replays, but the replay is buggy / out of sync
3. There is an issue with the GUI (e.g. elements not displaying correctly)
1. You cannot watch a replay (e.g. "fatal error: decompression failed" or similar)
2. You can watch replays, but the replay is buggy / out of sync
3. There is an issue with the GUI (e.g. elements not displaying correctly)
- For issues of type 1, include your patch_rt.mpq file and indicate how you obtained your copy of Brood War (CD, download from Blizzard, other...)
- For issues of type 2, include the replay and indicate at what time in the replay you noticed the issue.
- For issues of type 3, include a screen shot and indicate your browser version and operating system.
Please send your bug report to dev5(a t)openbw.com
Alternatively, you can also drop a post on our official OpenBW Forum here
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OpenBW HD
Because if they won't do it, we will do it ourselves.
![[image loading]](http://www.openbw.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/valkyrie_hd_orig.jpg)
3D MODEL SHOWCASE
![[image loading]](http://www.openbw.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/valkyrie_rotating.gif)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/VYa1ZrL.gif)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/x5Qh5cf.gif)
(Unit models by xiaorobear and quuad)
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CONTRIBUTING
If you are a 3D artist and want to collaborate, please contact us at dev5(a t)openbw.com!
Our development environment for 3D artists is ready.
As a contributing artist, you can upload your finished unit sprites to our staging environment and directly see your unit in-game.
Just watch a replay and toggle 'q' to switch between original graphics and your new unit.
A first draft of the style guide and tutorials are available to get you started.
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SUBPROJECT UPDATES
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Wednesday, Feb 08 5:12am GMT (GMT+00:00)
Staging area is ready to be used by contributing artists.
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BW AI IDE
INTRODUCTION
Intended to facilitate the setup for aspiring bot developers, the BW AI IDE module (Broodwar Artificial Intelligence Integrated Development Environment module) aims to provide an integrated development environment consisting of all required tools to kick-start development. Ready to be used out of the box!
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OPEN BWAPI
BWAPI is the de-facto standard to interact with BW as a developer. It runs on Windows only and provides an interface to the original Broodwar game. OpenBWAPI provides the exact same interface, but connects to the OpenBW game engine as its backend. The source of BWAPI, OpenBW, and OpenBWAPI are all open and they compile on Linux. This means you can develop and run Broodwar bots on Linux.
Relevant Open-Source Github Repositories:
Original BWAPI
OpenBW
OpenBWAPI
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FURTHER COMPONENTS
Currently in the process of development is the Java API called BWAPI4J
It will run on both Windows and Linux out of the box and provides a step towards a type-safe API.
It is the ideal entry point for developers with Java experience.
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CONTRIBUTING TO THE IDE
All the code is open-source and available in the repositories linked above. If you want to contribute you can either fork the repository or create pull requests. To avoid redundant work we would appreciate if you talked to us about your ideas.
Note that the documentation is very rudimentary at the moment. We can walk you through the steps of setting everything up via chat on IRC freenode #openbw or #bwapi until the documentation is finished.
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SUBPROJECT UPDATES
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Monday, Jun 19 6:54pm GMT (GMT+00:00)
Published OpenBW and OpenBWAPI repositories.
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FAQ
HOW CAN I SUGGEST A FEATURE?
You have ideas how to further improve OpenBW? Found something that does not work as it should?
Let us know here on TL or in our feedback forum:
![[image loading]](http://www.openbw.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/forum.png)
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HOW CAN I REPORT AN ISSUE?
Please refer to our bug report section of the replay viewer module here
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HOW CAN I HELP?
Developers
All of our code is published at https://github.com/OpenBW. You can either fork the repositories or commit pull requests. We would appreciate if you get in touch with us and tell us about your idea to prevent redundant work.
Artists
Design guidelines and license agreement are still a work in progress, but please do contact us!
Other
There is plenty of other work to do. Recording of sound effects, map tilesets in HD, thorough testing, etc. Let us know if you have something you would like to contribute.
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FURTHER QUESTIONS
Please also read our OpenBW FAQ.
EDIT HISTORY
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Monday, Jun 19 6:54pm GMT (GMT+00:00) Introduced BW AI IDE module. Published OpenBW and OpenBWAPI repositories.
Tuesday, Mar 21 12:33am GMT (GMT+00:00): Added graphs.
Wednesday, Feb 08 5:12am GMT (GMT+00:00): Staging area is ready to be used by contributing artists.
Tuesday, Jan 24 3:45am GMT (GMT+00:00): The replay viewer now supports sound.
Tuesday, Jan 10 1:03am GMT (GMT+00:00): added support for Protoss race and announcement section
Tuesday, Jan 03 4:33pm GMT (GMT+00:00): layout redesign by l3rand0n, added vision statement
Tuesday, Jan 03 5:11am GMT (GMT+00:00): added upgrades tab and research tab
Monday, Jan 02 5:09pm GMT (GMT+00:00): added general section with info on feedback and collaboration
Saturday, Dec 31 5:31am GMT (GMT+00:00): added unit selection and health bars
Wednesday, Dec 21 11:41pm GMT (GMT+00:00): added support for Zerg race
Tuesday, Dec 20 1:55am GMT (GMT+00:00): added army composition tab, un-spoilered replay viewer screenshots
Saturday, Dec 17 7:21pm GMT (GMT+00:00): updated replay viewer section
Thursday, Dec 15 3:58pm GMT (GMT+00:00): added replay feature overview, OpenBW HD section, ToC, formatting
Wednesday, Dec 14 4:52pm GMT (GMT+00:00): added header image
Tuesday, Dec 13 10:17pm GMT (GMT+00:00): added the updates section
Monday, Dec 12 3:43pm GMT (GMT+00:00): added how-to and bug report sections
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/FoNcwfc.png)
