Here you will find general information about the VCMI connector, why it is needed and how it works.
The connector is the "man-in-the-middle" for all communication between
VcmiGym (Python gym environment) and VCMI (C++ library):
Internally, the Connector is composed of two parts:
- PyConnector
- CppConnector
Together, they form the "link" between the gym env and VCMI.
If we take VcmiGym's point of view, communication with VCMI is as simple as
calling vcmi.get_state(action) to obtain the new environment state:
Doing the same with VCMI's point of view, communication with VcmiGym
(the "AI") is as simple as calling ai.getAction(state) to obtain next action:
The problem is: both components assume the role of the caller in this state-action exchange and that simply can't happen in practice without some kind of a buffer in between. That "buffer" is the Connector and here's how it works:
Although more stuff is happening under the hood, in a nutshell, two different
threads are synchronized with the help of locks and condvars. Here's the same
call to step() with some implementation details:
There's several more of those diagrams. They really helped me during the connector development phase, so others (and future me) might find them useful as well:
