Simulation Primer

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Introduction

So, you've installed GAMS and now you're ready to get started with some simulations? Great news. GAMS simulations are easy to setup with real, distributed, and decentralized agents that scale to dozens and hundreds within seconds in the Unreal Engine. On this page, we'll walk through your first GAMS simulations.

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The Basics of Simulation

We'll only be covering the setup of Unreal, UnrealGAMS, and GAMS on Ubuntu Linux. Simulating with GAMS involves two basic steps:

1. Start the UnrealGAMS instance (essentially, launch the Unreal Engine)
2. Launch at least one GAMS agent controller (e.g., $GAMS_ROOT/bin/gams_controller)

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Starting UnrealGAMS

Depending on how you installed UnrealGAMS, you can start UnrealGAMS in two different ways. First, if you downloaded a release candidate, you can simply launch UnrealGAMS.sh from within the extracted release candidate. Second, if you cloned the UnrealGAMS repo (e.g., with $GAMS_ROOT/scripts/linux/base_build.sh unreal-gams), then you can run cook.sh from within the cloned directory after you've built everything with base_build.sh. Within the cloned directory will be an out/LinuxNoEditor, which has an UnrealGAMS.sh. We tend to recommend modifying this UnrealGAMS.sh to operate in a smaller windows mode instead of the default full screen. To do this, simply download this example script and replace the result of the cook.sh command.

From Release Candidate (Download)

unzip UnrealGAMS.zip
cd UnrealGAMS
./UnrealGAMS.sh

From Git Clone

$GAMS_ROOT/scripts/linux/base_build.sh unreal-gams gams madara
<reload your terminal if it's first install by closing and reopening your terminal>
cd $UNREAL_GAMS_ROOT
./cook.sh
cd out/LinuxNoEditor
UnrealGAMS.sh

Either of the above will acquire the UnrealGAMS simulation environment and start an instance of it