[Playerstage-users] Questions on including objects, dynamic objects

[Douglas S. B. <db...@br...>]

Hello,

We've just discovered Player/Stage and found that it seems to work very well
for our needs. We're planning on using it for our multi-robot simulation needs
in our Pyro project. Pyro is Python Robotics and is detailed at
http://wiki.cs.brynmawr.edu/?Pyro (One of our goals is to create an
easy-to-use interface and objects for teaching Ai/robotics. Python fits the
bill very nicely, and Stage seems very solid and clean -- a nice fit!)

We are using Boyoon Jung's Python code as a base, and in just a couple of
hours had a Stage of robots running our neural network, evolutionary, behavior
based, self-organizing map, etc, Python code.

Now the questions: we want students to be able to easily create their own
worlds. It would be nice to copy, say, "everything.world" and make a couple of
changes. But it appears that included files no longer can be found. Is there a
PATH or some other method to make worlds find the files in the directory
/stage/worlds/? Otherwise, do the the students just have to copy all of those
files to their own directory? 

It seems that the only way to load a world is to either have it in the current
directory or give a path. Is that correct? Is there a STAGEDIR environment
variable that would allow "stage everything.world" to work?

We have some students that want to create some environments very different a
standard world. For example, they want to have an object that dynamically
changes color when a robot gets close to it. Are there any examples of
something like that? If not, is there an interface to do something like that?
I've seen the "truth" interface, but didn't find any examples, but it looks
like it might not be able to change "visible" or "color".

Thanks for a great system, and for any pointers,

-Doug

-- 
Douglas S. Blank,       Assistant Professor         
db...@br...,          (610)526-6501
Bryn Mawr College,  Computer Science Program
101 North Merion Ave,  Park Science Building
Bryn Mawr, PA 19010 dangermouse.brynmawr.edu