Client Lifecycle (experimental)

In the examples above, we manually start the client_pools by running something along the lines of :

$MALMO_MINECRAFT_ROOT/launchClient.sh -port 10000
$MALMO_MINECRAFT_ROOT/launchClient.sh -port 10001

An experimental feature also allows you to start the launchClients on the fly. The cleanup of the said Minecraft client processes is still not done automatically and the users are expected to manually remove the said clients when they are done. (This will change soon.)

This can be achieved by two ways :

1. Automatically

If the game_params provided to marlo.make do not contain the client_pool key, then marlo will attempt to start the correct number of clients on some random free ports.

import marlo
join_tokens = marlo.make('MarLo-MazeRunner-v0',
                          params={
                            "agent_names" :
                              [
                                "MarLo-Agent-0",
                                "MarLo-Agent-1"
                              ]
                          })

The code above should automatically start two Minecraft clients.

2. Manual Launch

import marlo
client_pool = marlo.launch_clients(2)
join_tokens = marlo.make('MarLo-MazeRunner-v0',
                          params={
                            "client_pool" : client_pool,
                            "agent_names" : ["MarLo-Agent-0", "MarLo-Agent-1"]
                          })

The ``marlo.launch_clients`` helper function will launch the clients.

Warning

The Minecraft Client processes created by this approach are not automatically cleaned up.

Note

• Both the approaches above expect the MALMO_MINECRAFT_ROOT environment variable to point to the absolute path of the Minecraft folder containing the launchClient scripts.