Observation for nearby entities

[timhutton]

(Entities are the moving things like creepers, animals and other players.)

Observations might include: position, orientation, action, carrying.

Let us know if this observation is important to you.

[TGlas]

Hostile mobs are apparently of interest, and so are animals. But the first thing that appears to me when thinking of entities are dropped blocks and items. I don't mean falling sand, I mean the "little" blocks and item that hover over the ground when items are droppend and blocks are broken. The ability to pick up items and blocks that were broken (e.g., with a tool) is an important component of mining and foraging behaviors.
For the data, I mostly care for the position, and maybe for the amount (in case of blocks/items).

[timhutton]

@TGlas Ah, yes, we also need an observation for those. I think they're called 'items' in the Minecraft code. I'll add another issue. (#90)

[MiniDigger]

Entity are basically everything that is somewhat dynamic in minecraft.(dropped) Items are entities, mobs are entities. The weather is a entity. What you are referring to are living entities, a sub class of entity. I think that class is actually called entityliving in Mojangs code.

[TGlas]

As I see it, all of these dynamic things are potentially useful, i.e., as groud truth data for supervised training of computer vision methods, or at least for performance assessment. However, those entities that don't affect the gameplay directly (like the weather) should be of low priority.

[einsteinsci]

Weather can affect gameplay directly through snow, which can add an extra block the agent has to dig through before reaching the ground. Also, if for some odd reason you want the agent to make snowballs, it needs to find a snowy biome or wait for it to rain in a cold biome.

I never knew that weather even inherited from Entity. I must be so used to EntityLiving to consider the stranger entities. Do particles inherit from Entity? Those can be useful sources of information to the agent sometimes.

[MiniDigger]

yeah, particles inherit from Entity too, there is a EntityFX class where all particles inherit from. it extends entity.
just generated javadocs from the deobfuscated sources and there are 120 subclasses (direct and indirect) of entity. So basically everything is a entity ^^
as said above, everything that is dynamic in some way is a entity. only tileentities (blocks with "special abilities") are not entities.

[NoahReifsnyder]

Is there the ability to get the entities orientation from Observation from nearby entities?

[DaveyBiggers]

@NoahReifsnyder not currently - feel free to make a feature request by creating a new issue.