element33

I’m developing an idea called Competitive Organisms on Networks: AI agents constrained to geometric graphs (not free space), where the graph is a "habitat".

The current project is a 2-agent pursuit/evasion scenario: the prey must collect all food to win, the chaser must catch the prey to win.

The rule-based agents were created in Houdini (VEX). Then the environment was re-created in Unity to train ML agents.

- Verdict: both approaches can create competitive agents

- Biggest mistake: to equalize chances for the rule-based agents, I gave the chaser a small speed advantage. This, unintentionally, created a "super chaser" in Unity

- Takeaways: 1) better to equalize chances with environmental conditions, not advantages, 2) the environment defines the performance ceiling more than the brain "type": i.e. hand-coded vs ML agents.

The YT video walks through the setup, shows a few sample games and what was learned.

Seems like there's a conflict between the UI scale set in Houdini's Preferences dialog and the HOUDINI_UISCALE variable in houdini.env. I've now set the Preferences value to 1 and the HOUDINI_UISCALE variable to what I want. As of right now, the Houdini UI scale seems to work. I also have my custom DPI value set in Windows (for Win apps), which, I think, may add another factor to the DPI conflicts. As a person gets older, every day he faces the same question: "How do I set the fonts in this darn app so I can see stuff"

Scaling the UI (Preferences->General UI->Global UI Scale) used to work fine, but in 20.5.278 (Win) I get random behavior. The value is set to 1.2, but Houdini randomly chooses whether to scale the UI or not: sometimes it launches in "normal size" (too small for me), sometimes with the UI scaled up (the way I want it). I checked my houdini.env, I don't set the UI scale there, so there shouldn't be any interference. And even if there were, the effect on the UI should be constant, not random. Has something changed in 20.5?