Custom tensorboard observations

[MikeWise2718]

Proposed change(s)

Added custom TensorBoard observations - This is code I had running last December, but I worked this weekend to bring it up to date with the current master branch.

Overview

Here is a summary of the important changes I had to do to get this to work

Protobuf changes:

• Added a new type to the protobuf defintions (EnvironmentStatisticsProto) to communicate data to the Python UnityEnvironment and merge it into BatchedStepResult.
• Added EnvironmentStatisticsProto to UnityRLOutputProto

Python changes:

• Modified base_env.py, rpc_utils.py, and environment.py to read those.
• Modified agent_processor.py to pass those values to TensorBoard

C# Changes:

• Added a class to manage the collections EnvStatMan.cs in com.unity.agents/Runtime
• Made some minor modifications to Academy.cs and RpcCommunication.cs to integrate the EnvStatMan class into the RPC communicatino.
• Added a couple of counters (foodEaten, poisonEaten) to the FoodCollectionSettings.cs
• Added a FixedUpdate event handler to FoodCollectionSettings.cs to update those settings.

Other Changes

• There are a lot of little unimportant changes in this pull request that should not be there, but I am not sure how to quickly get rid of these so I am leaving them in for now. I think it is obvious what is signal and what is noise.

Let me know if you have questions or requests.

Mike Wise

mwise@microsoft.com

Types of change(s)

• New feature

Checklist

Other comments

[CLAassistant]

All committers have signed the CLA.

[chriselion]

Hi @MikeWise2718,
Thanks for the submission. The team needs to talk internally about this a bit more - it's definitely a useful feature (there have been several requests for it), but I don't think think this is the way we want it implemented.

I'm trying to wrap up a few other loose ends, but I'll return to this later this week...

[MikeWise2718]

Thanks for taking a look.

Is it about using the bytes side_channel instead of a custom map in the protobuf definitions? I could give it a shot of using that. I thought about using that, but I didn't see how I could side_channel in a way that would accommodate usage by other features - there needs to be some kind of id I would think.

I could also clean up the submission if that would help. I didn't do a great job on getting rid of extraneous changes before submitting, which is kind of stupid I guess.

[chriselion]

Hi @MikeWise2718,
Sorry for the delay, as you can imagine things are a bit crazy right now, and it took a while to get the group together to discuss how to handle this.

I'm going to start working on a sidechannel approach for this; hopefully I'll have something to review today or tomorrow.

[chriselion]

Hi @MikeWise2718,
This was implemented in #3660 and I think it should be equivalent to your PR in terms of interface and end results.

[chriselion]

Closing this off since the equivalent functionality was added.