Re: [simspark-devel] [Sserver-three-d] Documentation and wikis

[Drew N. <dre...@ya...>]

The bulk of the work has been done in porting the documentation across to the Wiki.  I have broken it up into what felt like sensible topics to me, and I'm open to alternative ideas.  I've spent a while going through trying to cross-reference articles to increase visibility of the new content for visitors.

There is some information on this page that shows what new pages were created, and what sections of the PDF I didn't port over because they seemed out of date or particular to a paper document.

http://simspark.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Users_Manual#Wiki_Version

I have also left several TODO markers accompanied by short questions on a few pages.  Much of the documentation was out of date and it would be great to have more experienced people read it through.

I still have to reconcile my errata.  I'll do that soon.

Also Joschka, I took a screenshot of a diagram that was included in your SIMPAR paper and included it on the wiki.  I can remove it if it doesn't have the appropriate license for use on the wiki.  Apologies, but that only crossed my mind after I'd joyfully copied your work!

I've made a quick job of putting more content on the main page under slightly different groupings. Any feedback, good or bad, is appreciated.

http://simspark.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

> We should also document that it is possible to run agents as plugins directly in the simulator process...

This has been done.

> ...about two years ago Carlos Bustamante was kind enough to document the monitor protocol further...

That PDF is a great start, but it only covers messages from the server to the monitor.  I am particularly interested in those messages that I can send to the server on port 3200 in order to perform machine learning.  Any pointers to information on that would be great.

All the best,

Drew.



________________________________
From: Joschka Boedecker <jos...@am...>
To: Drew Noakes <dr...@dr...>
Cc: 3D Server ML <sse...@li...>; Simspark Devel ML <sim...@li...>; Richard Keely <rc...@gm...>
Sent: Tue, 15 June, 2010 11:04:08
Subject: Re: [simspark-devel] [Sserver-three-d] Documentation and wikis

Hi Drew and all,

On Jun 14, 2010, at 11:47 PM, Drew Noakes wrote:

> 
> I'll get started in the next day or so.  

Excellent!

> No doubt I'll have many questions, so I'll add them to the wiki itself and ask people more knowledgeable than me to fill in the blanks.
> 

OK, sounds good.

> I saw somewhere a task along the lines of "update TeX files with TEXT_INSTEAD_OF_A_MANUAL".  Does this text file represent the most up-to-date information?  I will be sure to draw from all sources I can find, but if there are conflicts I'd like to know which source is more authoritative.
> 

The TEXT_INSTEAD_OF_A_MANUAL file was used as the basis for the user manual. However, not all of the information made it into the tex files (we planned a server developer's manual that was supposed to contain some of that information, see also below). So I guess in places where there is overlap, the manual should be more recent.  

> Also, does anyone have any documentation about the monitor protocol?  

Part of it is documented in the TEXT_INSTEAD_OF_A_MANUAL. In addition, about two years ago Carlos Bustamante was kind enough to document the monitor protocol further. Unfortunately, the information never made it into the manual (it was supposed to go into the developer's manual, but so far, we haven't gotten started on that one yet :-( ). You can find his draft at [1]. It might be incomplete, and possibly slightly out of date, but it's a good start.

> If not then I will reverse it from TrainerCommandParser.  I was going to ask the list whether it would be possible to add the ability to position the ball exactly for machine learning purposes, only to find mention of this interface in a changelog somewhere. It'd be great to have it detailed on the wiki.
> 

If I'm not mistaken, it is also described in the TEXT_INSTEAD_OF_A_MANUAL file.

We should also document that it is possible to run agents as plugins directly in the simulator process, with no network communication required (example is given in the soccerbotbehavior in rcssserver3d/plugin/soccer/agentintegration). This should also be interesting for machine learning and debugging purposes, and it might be another one of those useful but not very well known features of the simulator. I mention it in the overview paper I wrote for the SIMPAR 2008 workshop [2], but that might be its only mention I'm afraid.

Just as a general note, not directly concerning the documentation, I wanted to let people know that we have started development on the integration of the Bullet physics engine into the simulator as an alternative to ODE. My colleague Richard Keely has kindly taken on that task, and I'll try to assist.

Best regards,
Joschka

[1] http://jeap-res.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/~joschka/simspark/monitorprotocol.pdf
[2] http://monicareggiani.net/simpar2008/RoboCupSimulators/SIMPAR_simspark.pdf