Some atari videos are rendered with flashing black screen

[ppwwyyxx]

For example, here: https://gym.openai.com/evaluations/eval_zIeNk5MxSGOmvGEUxrZDUw I observed the same thing when I used monitor to record a video.

Haven't checked if the observed state is also like this.

[lakshayg]

A solution to this problem was pointed out in #378 by @tlbtlbtlb. I am quoting his comment here

There are versions of the environments that do what I think you want, formed by adding Deterministic or NoFrameSkip to the name. For example, env.make("AirRaidDeterministic-v3").

You can see a list of all the available environments at https://pastebin.com/pefCGyL7 or by running the script https://github.com/openai/gym/blob/master/examples/scripts/list_envs

[doronsobol]

I tried @lakshayg idea and ran all the versions of "AirRaid" and I still get mostly black screen.

Using older versions of gym I don't get black screens but those weird images: instead of:

If someone has an idea of how to fix that, either by fixing the images of the older version, or by other methods it would be very helpfull.

the code I used: env = gym.make('AirRaidNoFrameskip-v0') env.reset() game_count = 1 for i in range(50000): action_n = env.actionspace.sample() state, , done, info = env.step(action_n) env.render() if done: env.reset()

Thanks

[tlbtlbtlb]

You probably have incompatible versions of gym and atari-py. Try pip install atari-py.

[doronsobol]

@tlbtlbtlb Thanks for the quick answer, but I'm using the latest atari-py (0.1.1) and gym (0.9.4) and I keep getting black screens - specifically in this game (AirRaid) in all of it's versions.

[tlbtlbtlb]

Random intervals of blackness are part of the AirRaid game. I think it's simulating the city shutting off the power so the bombers can't see it clearly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Raid_(video_game).

It's not a great game, and it was a commercial failure back in the 70s (only a few were sold.) It does seem like an interesting one for RL research, because the agent needs to remember where the attackers are when the screen is black.

A good sanity check on the game-vs-gym behavior is to install Stella which lets you play all the Atari games. It's called "AIR_RAID.BIN" in the menu.

[doronsobol]

I played this game in Stella and didn't get those black frames, I seems that in the gym almost all of the frames are black.

[tlbtlbtlb]

Playing under Stella 4.7.3, most of the frames are black. Screen capture from my Mac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuMfNpsNSns&feature=youtu.be

[ppwwyyxx]

That's weird. I was playing it with stella 5.0.2 on Linux. Can't see those black frames. Rom downloaded from atari-py: https://github.com/openai/atari-py/blob/master/atari_py/atari_roms/air_raid.bin

[wookayin]

For those who might find this thread in the future: see also #596.

[trav1s]

I had the same issue as @doronsobol with other atari games like breakout and pong. its clearly a display bug and not normal. The workaround from @stefanutti also worked for me: pip install atari-py==0.0.21

seems some kind of version incompatibility between atari-py and other packages.

[wookayin]

Any solutions with using recent version of atari-py, say 0.1.6? Why is it happening?

[christopherhesse]

I looked into the original air_raid issue here: https://github.com/openai/gym/issues/1650 and it looks like it's a problem with ALE.