Team communication

Stefan Glaser
2026-02-25T19:37:23Z

We need some kind of team communication in the simulator. As MuJoCo doesn't handle sound - as far as I'm aware of - we need to develop something on top of it.

In SimSpark, team communication is handled by the say-effector and hear-perceptor, which allow for a limited, message based communication. From my understanding, there exists some model for the say and hear capacity of an agent, restricting the communication bandwidth and capability, but I don't know how it works in detail.

In the humanoid leagues, team communication is team internal (receiving only messages of the own team) and not limited in size. There exists a predefined mixed-team-communication protocol to allow different teams to cooperate in a mixed-team match. However, in general, teams are free to implement their own protocols, too.

I'm not sure how team communication is currently handled in SPL. I know that they also have some limitations in place and the game controller keeps track of the communication budget of each team. But I'm not sure about the protocol situation there.

A lot of teams in the past had issues obeying the character restriction rules in their S-Expression encodings. So I wonder if we should just allow an arbitrary S-Expression message in a first version of the team communication.
This would basically resemble the situation of the humanoid leagues and hopefully eliminate encoding issues on client side. Restrictions on "hear distance", "voice actuation", etc. can be implemented in later versions.

Feel free to add further suggestions / ideas or start a discussion in the comments.