<lmargin%:5><rmargin%:95><font:Arial Bold:20>Training Mode
<font:Arial:14>In training mode you will set up the scenarios to train your army for battle. When you enter training, you are asked to select a team you wish to continue training, or select "Create New Team" to start from scratch.   Note that the specific options in all the pull-down menus and the three panels on the screen are described in the appendix.  The text that follows explains how these functions work in general.

<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>Movement<spop>
To move around in training, use the 'W', 'A', 'S' and 'D' keys to move forward and strafe, and the 'Q' and 'E' keys to rotate. If you want a closer view of the action, press 'M' to get into free look mode and use WASD and the mouse to get a closer look. Press 'M' again to bring back your cursor and enable you to interact with the environment.

Pressing 'P' will pause the simulation and allow you to easily select a robot to right click on. Pressing 'P' again will un-pause the game.

If at any time you are not satisfied with the controls, press 'O' to bring up the options menu and feel free to remap them to suit your needs.

<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>Mouse Interaction<spop>
The main way of interacting with the environment is with the mouse. Double clicking the left mouse button will add a flag in the world, while right clicking will bring up a location specific context menu (meaning actions will occur at the point you clicked at). The contextual menu is organized into sub-menus, for example, initially you have the choice of placing a flag or opening the Spawn Menu. The spawn menu is further split into "Spawn Team", "Spawn Wall" or "Spawn Enemy" which place the training team, a wall, or an enemy at the location you clicked respectively.

After choosing "Spawn a team here", you will see soldiers falling from the sky at the position you selected. This is the army that you will train, and the place they are falling from is called "the factory." After your factory has been created, you will notice that the context menu has changed. When you click on the ground, the menu has a new "Set Milestone" item:

<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>"Set milestone"<spop> is a way to make your team remember important skills.  It is meant to be used when you have trained them to do something useful and now you want to switch to a different task, but you don't want them to forget the first one.  Example: You first trained the robots to approach the enemy.  Now you remove the enemy and want to train them to go to the flag.  However, you want them to remember how to approach the enemy.  If you choose "Milestone" before the switch, they should retain the original skill of going to the enemy, even while they learn the new skill at the same time. 

When a milestone is set, the option in the menu becomes <spush><font:Arial Bold:16>"Flush Milestone"<spop>, which allows the robots to forget it.  Important: You do not need to milestone unless the second task is unrelated to the first task.  For example, if you train to go to the enemy, then you would not milestone before training to go to the enemy around a wall, because the second task is related to the first one, and therefore does not require a special milestone to be set.  Milestoning is a largely experimental option based on cutting-edge research.  Please see our paper, Retaining Learned Behavior during Real-Time Neuroevolution, for technical information on milestoning and how it works.

Your context menu will change if you right click a player, wall, or enemy (recall that you can press P to pause before selecting items on the field by right clicking):

When right clicking on walls you created, you have the choice to move, rotate, scale, or delete them. Moving the mouse left and right will rotate the object and also scale it. So for example, if you want to elongate a wall, right click it, select Scale Y or Scale X depending on your orientation, and move the mouse cursor rightward.

Right-clicking on soldiers you are training, you have the choice to converge on them, or smite them. Converge means that your entire population's brains will be replaced with the selected soldier's brain.  When used correctly, converge can be a powerful function, allowing you to quickly circulate a behavior throughout the entire population. 

It is important to note that some converged behaviors can be unstable, since they were not learned in a natural way.  If a convergence didn't work out as you expected, "Undo Converge" is an available option on the menu when you right-click the ground.

<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>"Smite"<spop> allows you to punish a solider that you don't like. It will be strongly penalized and sent back to the factory.

Right-clicking on enemies lets you choose to move, rotate, delete, or inhabit them. Inhabit means you control the unit from a first person perspective, that is, you will inhabit and control its body. WASD will move you around, left clicking fires your weapon (if the type of enemy you inhabit has a weapon), and by default, right clicking will exit this mode. Your team will learn from interacting with you assuming the correct slider settings are set.  (For example, to encourage them to learn to avoid getting shot you should punish them for getting shot.)  By pressing “C” by default, you can change the current camera mode.

When you are inhabiting an enemy, you can look at the world through the robots' sensors: these are displayed at the upper right as ranging from 0 (black) to 1 (white).





