Soccer Player Simulator
Mackworth [Mackworth93] introduced the idea of using soccer-playingrobots in research. Unfortunately, the idea did not get the properresponse until the idea was further developed and adapted by Kitano,Asada, and Kuniyoshi, when proposing a Japanese research programme,called Robot J-League [2]. During the autumn of 1993, severalAmerican researchers took interest in the Robot J-League, and itthereafter changed name to the Robot World Cup Initiative or RoboCupfor short. RoboCup is sometimes referred to as the RoboCup challengeor the RoboCup domain.
Soccer Player Simulator
Besides the commentator exhibition and RoboCup Rescue, the main bodyof the RoboCup challenge consists of several leagues for soccerplaying. However, as this manual is about the simulated league we willonly focus on it.
The RoboCup simulator league is based on the RoboCup simulator calledthe soccer server [Noda97RoboCup97], a physical soccer simulation system.All games are visualised by displaying the field of the simulator by thesoccer monitor on a computer screen. The soccer server is written to supportcompetition among multiple virtual soccer players in an uncertainmulti-agent environment, with real-time demands as well assemi-structured conditions. One of the advantages of the soccer serveris the abstraction made, which relieves the researchers from having tohandle robot problems such as object recognition [9], communications,and hardware issues, e.g., how to make a robot move. The abstractionenables researchers to focus on higher level concepts such ascooperation and learning.
A match is carried out in a client/server style: A server,soccerserver, provides a virtual field and simulates all movements ofa ball and players. Each client controls movements of oneplayer. Communication between the server and each client is done viaUDP/IP sockets. Therefore users can use any kind of programing systemsthat have UDP/IP facilities.
The soccerserver consists of 2 programs, soccerserver andsoccermonitor. Soccer Server is a server program that simulatesmovements of a ball and players, communicates with clients, andcontrols a game according to rules. Soccermonitor is a program thatdisplays the virtual field from the soccerserver on the monitor usingthe X window system. A number of soccermonitor programs can connectwith one soccerserver, so we can display field-windows on multiple displays.
A client connects with soccerserver by an UDP socket. Using thesocket, the client sends commands to control a player of the clientand receives information from sensors of the player. In other words, aclient program is a brain of the player: The client receives visualand auditory sensor information from the server, and sendscontrol-commands to the server.
Each client can control only one player 56 . So a team consists of thesame number of clients as players. Communications between the clientsmust be done via soccerserver using say and hear protocols. (Seesection Player Command Protocol.) One of the purposes of soccerserveris evaluation of multi-agent systems, in which efficiency of communication betweenagents is one of the criteria. Users must realize control of multipleclients by such restricted communication.
In this section we will first describe the history of the soccerserverand thereafter the history of the RoboCup Simulation League. To endthe section we will also describe the history of the manual effort.
The first, preliminary, original system of soccerserver was written inSeptember of 1993 by Itsuki Noda, ETL. This system was built as alibrary module for demonstration of a programming language called MWP,a kind of Prolog system that has multi-threads and high level programmanipulation. The module was a closed system and displayed a field ona character display, that is VT100.
The first version (version 0) of the client-server style server waswritten in July of 1994 on a LISP system. The server shows the fieldon an X window system, but each player was shown in an alphabetcharacter. It used the TCP/IP protocol for connections withclients. This LISP version of soccerserver became the original styleof the current soccerserver. Therefore, the current soccerserver usesS-expressions for the protocol between clients and the server.
The LISP version of soccerserver was re-written in C++ in August of1995 (version 1). This version was announced at the IJCAI workshop onEntertainment and AI/Alife held in Montreal, Canada, August 1995.
The development of version 2 started January of 1996 in order toprovide the official server of preRoboCup-96 held at Osaka, Japan,November 1996. From this version, the system is divided into twomodules, soccerserver and soccerdisplay (currently,soccermonitor). Moreover, the feature of coach mode was introducedinto the system. These two features enabled researchers on machinelearning to execute games automatically. Peter Stone at CarnegieMellon University joined the decision-making process for thedevelopment of the soccerserver at this stage. For example, he createdthe configuration files that were used at preRoboCup-96.
In this competition, the champion team exhibited clearly superiorlow-level skills. One of its main advantages in this regard was itsability to kick the ball harder than any other team. Its players didso by kicking the ball around themselves, continually increasing itsvelocity so that it ended up moving towards the goal faster than wasimagined possible. Since the soccerserver did not (at that time)enforce a maximum ball speed, a property that was changed immediatelyafter the competition, the ball could move arbitrarily fast, making italmost impossible to stop. With this advantage at the low-levelbehavior level, no team, regardless of how strategicallysophisticated, was able to defeat the eventual champion.
The main novelty in the Soccer Simulation League in 2004 was theintroduction of the 3D soccer simulator, where players are spheresin a three-dimensional environment with a full physical model. Thissub-competition was the spawning point for the Soccer Simulation3D League in later years.
The tenth international RoboCup championship, RoboCup 2005, was heldin July 2005 in Osaka, Japan [16]. It was accompaniedby the RoboCup Symposium.Since, for the first time, the 3D sub-league of soccer simulationhad its own tournament, the number of teams that were maximallyallowed to qualify for the Soccer Simulation 2D competitions atRoboCup 2005 was reduced to 16 (though a17th team was permitted for reasons of the qualifying procedure).
The first versions of the manual were written by Itsuki Noda, whiledeveloping the soccerserver, and around version 3.00 there wereseveral requests on an updated manual, to better correspond to theserver as well as enable newcomers to more easily participate in theRoboCup World Cup Initiative. In the fall of 1998 Peter Stoneinitiated the Soccer Manual Effort, over which Johan Kummeneje tookresponsibility to organize and as a result the Soccer Server Manualversion 4.0 was released on the 1st of November 1998.
Since 1999, the soccerserver has changed major version to 7 and iscontinuously developed. Therefore the Soccer Manual Effort hasdeveloped a new version, which resulted in a PDF version of theSoccer Manual (available on Sourceforge) that has been the mainreference document for many years.
In 2009 and 2010 (soccerserver versions 12 and 14), significant changeswere introduced to the way the soccerserver simulates soccer, includinga changed tackle model and a sideward dash model to mention just a few.The corresponding changes of those times were, unfortunately, notincorporated into the existing soccerserver manual, but were reflectedonly in the NEWS text file as part of the soccerserver softwarepackage.
Soccer Manager 2023 is the latest game in the successful Soccer Manager franchise. The latest edition plays much like its predecessors, with a few choice updates and upgrades from prior years. It is a team management simulator like most soccer games on Android. You start by managing a team in the league of your choice. As you play, you build up the team, the facilities, and other aspects of your franchise. It boasts over 900 clubs, 25,000 players, and a fairly in-depth look at your play stats as you accrue them. Like most, the yearly release cycle means there are more bugs than average, so keep an eye out for that.
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