📢 Starter Kit Update

Orak Game Agent Challenge
#1

Hello everyone! A quick heads up about an important stability update to the starter kit.

We’ve migrated the transport/communication backend (previously based on MCP/FastMCP) to gRPC to make the interaction between your agent and the game environment more robust and predictable .

What changed?

  • The underlying transport layer is now gRPC-based .
  • The agent-facing interface and APIs are unchanged . Your existing agent code should continue to work as is.
  • The main goal of this change is better resilience under long games and reconnections .

Why this matters?

Some of you were seeing:

  • Random stalls / timeouts during longer runs
  • Reconnection issues
  • Episodes hanging with no clear error

These issues were caused by how requests were queued and retried in the previous MCP-based setup. With gRPC, we now strictly enforce “one client, one action in flight” , and we get clearer error handling, which should eliminate these stalls and make reconnect behavior much more reliable.

What you need to do

  1. Update your local starter kit
    • Pull the latest changes from the repo (e.g., git pull --rebase ).
  2. Reinstall/refresh dependencies if needed
    • uv sync
  3. Run your existing agents as usual
    • No changes should be required to your agent logic or environment interaction code.

If you still see issues

If you run into:

  • Timeouts
  • Stalls
  • Reconnection problems

please share:

  • Logs (client + server, if possible)
  • Approximate episode length and map
  • Steps to reproduce

This will help us quickly track down any remaining edge cases.

Thanks for your patience while we tracked this down.