BWEB

Broodwar Easy Builder or BWEB for short, is a BWEM based building placement addon. The purpose of this addon is to provide easily accesible building management. BWEB started as a decision to create a standard and simple method for bots to optimize their building space and placement.

What does BWEB do?

BWEB has 3 classes of information, Walls, Blocks and Stations.

Walls are made by permutating through a vector of UnitTypes in as many combinations as possible and measuring a BFS path length to find a wall that is either wall tight or minimizes enemy movement. Walls can be created using any BWAPI::UnitType and have optional parameters to pass in; what BWAPI::UnitType you want to be wall tight against, a vector of BWAPI::UnitType for defenses, or a reserve path can be created to ensure your units can leave the BWEM::Area that the Wall is being created in.

Blocks are used for all building types and are modifiable for any race and build. Blocks are useful for maximizing your space for production buildings without trapping units.

Stations are placed on every BWEM::Base and include defense positions that provide coverage for all your workers.

Why use BWEB?

Building placement is a very important aspect of Broodwar. Decisions such as hiding tech, walling a choke or finding more optimal use of your space are possible using BWEB. Most Broodwar bots suffer from many issues stemming from building placement, such as; timeouts, building where it's not safe, trapping units, and lack of fast expand options due to poor wall placement.

How do I install BWEB?

1. Clone the repository or download a copy.
2. In your source code, create a BWEB folder and store the files in there.
3. In Visual Studio, add the files to your project and edit the properties of your projects include directory to include BWEBs folder.

How do I use BWEB?

In any file in which you need to access BWEB, add the following include: #include "BWEB.h"

BWEB is accessed through the BWEB namespace. Map, Stations, Walls, Blocks and PathFinding is all accessed through their respective namespace inside the BWEB namespace.

• Map contains useful functions such as quick ground distance calculations, natural and main choke identifying and tracking of used tiles for buildings.
• Stations contains placements for BWEM::Bases, tracking the defense count and placements around them.
• Walls contains the ability to create walls at any BWEM::Chokepoint and BWEM::Area. These walls currently store the location of the BWAPI::UnitType::TileSize of each segment of the created wall, defense placements and an optional opening called a door.
• Blocks contains placements for BWAPI::UnitTypes for a fairly optimized approach to placing production buildings. Blocks are placed with varying sizes and shapes to try and fit as many buildings into each BWEM::Area as possible.
• PathFinding provides the ability to take advantage of BWEBs blazing fast JPS to create paths.

BWEB needs to be initialized after BWEM is initialized. I would suggest including the following BWEB functions in your code: BWEB::Map::onStart() BWEB::Blocks::findBlocks()

All other BWEB functions have full comments describing their use and what parameters are required or optional. GL HF! If you have any questions, feel free to ask on BWAPI Discord.

Changelog

1.13.0

• Added Zerg blocks.
• Added line of best fit caches to each chokepoint.
• Added pathfinding cache for each type of walkable function passed in.
• Added main/natural station container.
• Added counters for air/ground defense counts for walls and stations.
• Fixed tight walls, made open walls better.

1.12.0

• Improved start block generation with desired position.
• Added semi functional proxy blocks inspired by Locutus' BWEB.
• Added ability to make custom JPS paths with walkable function passed in.
• Improved wall generation speed.
• Removed overlap grid, it was confusing and served the same purpose as the reserved grid.
• Tidied up Wall.cpp

1.11.2

• Fixed walkGrid to be a little more accurate.
• Fixed isPlaceable commented out checks.
• Fixed treating sunkens as a fragile defense.
• Added check to not place buildings under a hatchery in a wall.
• Added returning a pointer to the wall created by the shortform wall creation functions.

1.11.1

• Fixed a bug in perpendicular line function where the center point was incorrect.
• Removed angle check for pylon wall generation.

1.11

• Changed usedGrid to return the UnitType on the given TilePosition.
• Moved Block, Station, Wall and Pathfind class up to the BWEB namespace.
• Fixed a bug where terrain tight checks in wall generation failed on diagonals.
• Fixed a bug where terrain tight checks in wall generation were not correctly dynamic to the size of the tightness factor.
• Fixed crashes and incorrect choke choices on maps with naturals having 1 ramp connected to the main.
• Improved performance of wall generation slightly.

1.10

• Changed how blocks are generated to be more intuitive.
• Added a cached TilePosition resolution walkable grid.
• Added inlined BWAPI::Point converting functions to speed up Wall generation.
• Fixed line of best fit.
• Added functions to add/remove to BWEB grids.
• Added a reachable bool to pathfinding so that we don't try to pathfind to an unreachable area more than once per frame.
• Added generalized wall functions for commonly used walls.

1.09

• Added JPS pathfinding for unit paths.
• Fixed a bug in returning a copy of a vector.

1.08

• Restructured BWEB, removed singleton pattern.

1.07

• Improved Terran wall placement
• Recoded wall tight function

1.06

• Improved wall placement, should function better on every map.
• Added a unit pathing option (may move elsewhere later).
• Small bugfixes.

1.05

• Minor bugfixes, added Path class to setup for unit pathing.

1.04

• Paths are made using BFS instead of A*.
• Improved performance and no memory leaks.
• Placement on all buildings improved slightly.
• Door placement improved drastically.
• Defense placement moved further back from wall when possible.
• Pylons are as central as possible.

1.03

• General improvements across the board.

1.02

• Adjusted wall placements.
• Improved block generation speed and maximizing of space.

1.01

• Minor bug fixes, some slight wall improvements