ViZDoom Competitions: Playing Doom From Pixels

This paper presents the first two editions of Visual Doom AI Competition, held in 2016 and 2017. The challenge was to create bots that compete in a multiplayer deathmatch in a first-person shooter game Doom. The bots had to make their decisions solely based on visual information, i.e., a raw screen buffer. To play well, the bots needed to understand their surroundings, navigate, explore, and handle the opponents at the same time. These aspects, together with the competitive multiagent aspect of the game, make the competition a unique platform for evaluating the state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms. This paper discusses the rules, solutions, results, and statistics that give insight into the agents' behaviors. Best performing agents are described in more detail. The results of the competition lead to the conclusion that, although reinforcement learning can produce capable Doom bots, they still are not yet able to successfully compete against humans in this game. This paper also revisits the ViZDoom environment, which is a flexible, easy to use, and efficient three-dimensional platform for research for vision-based reinforcement learning, based on a well-recognized first-person perspective game Doom.