You control a spaceship. Blast enemies before they can blast you. You can warp to different sectors. You have to defend Federation planets, and destroy Zylon forces. Keep track of your fuel, if you run out you lose a life. Warp to a Federation planet to refuel. The game ends if all your ships are destroyed or if you reach the Solaris planet. Detailed documentation can be found on [the AtariAge page](https://atariage.com/manual_html_page.php?SoftwareLabelID=450)
By default, the environment returns the RGB image that is displayed to human players as an observation. However, it is possible to observe
- The 128 Bytes of RAM of the console
- A grayscale image
instead. The respective observation spaces are
-`Box([0 ... 0], [255 ... 255], (128,), uint8)`
- `Box([[0 ... 0]
...
[0 ... 0]], [[255 ... 255]
...
[255 ... 255]], (250, 160), uint8)
`
respectively. The general article on Atari environments outlines different ways to instantiate corresponding environments
via `gymnasium.make`.
### Rewards
You gain points for destroying enemies, rescuing cadets, making it through a corridor, destroying enemy planets etc. For a more detailed documentation, see [the AtariAge page](https://atariage.com/manual_html_page.php?SoftwareLabelID=450).
A thorough discussion of the intricate differences between the versions and configurations can be found in the
general article on Atari environments.
* v5: Stickiness was added back and stochastic frameskipping was removed. The entire action space is used by default. The environments are now in the "ALE" namespace.