Tutorials

Tutorials are how most people actually learn IgnitionAI. They’re different from the How it works pages in one important way: a tutorial builds a working thing from scratch, one step at a time, with every file shown and every decision explained. You don’t need to jump around — you start at the top, follow the steps, and at the bottom you have a trained agent.

Available tutorials

Tutorial	Difficulty	Time	Topic
GridWorld · Start here	Beginner	~30 min	Build a custom `TrainingEnv`, train a DQN agent, watch it find the shortest path in a 7×7 grid.
CartPole: custom observations	Beginner+	~25 min	What the agent sees is what the agent can learn. Three obs variants, one lesson.
MountainCar: reward shaping	Intermediate	~30 min	The classic sparse-reward trap — watch DQN fail, then fix it with dense shaping.
CartPole 3D (R3F)	Intermediate	~40 min	Wire the Quickstart CartPole into a React Three Fiber scene with shadows and orbit controls.
Car Circuit	Advanced	~60 min	The hero demo: oval track, non-trivial reward, chase cam, the lap-bonus bug you’ll write by accident.
Export to Unity (ONNX)	Advanced	~60 min	The full Train → Export → Convert → Deploy pipeline with Unity Sentis.
Drone Navigation (physics)	Advanced	~40 min + training	The flagship. Quadcopter with hand-rolled rigid-body physics, 6-DOF control, honest expectations about convergence, and the IgnitionAI philosophy section.

Suggested order

The tutorials are independently runnable, but there’s a natural progression:

GridWorld → custom env basics, zero-config training
CartPole observations → how observation design shapes learning
MountainCar reward shaping → how reward design shapes learning
CartPole 3D → your first R3F integration
Car Circuit → the advanced 3D showcase
Drone Navigation → real physics, 6-DOF control, friction vs difficulty
Export to Unity → the deploy story, end-to-end

If you’re in a hurry, do GridWorld → CartPole 3D → Export to Unity. That’s the minimum viable path from “never heard of IgnitionAI” to “shipped a trained policy in a game engine.”

Prerequisites for every tutorial

Before starting any tutorial, make sure you have:

Node.js 20 or later.
A package manager — npm, pnpm, or yarn all work; the tutorials use npm for the install commands.
A bundler that handles ES modules — Vite (recommended), Next.js, or Webpack 5. The tutorials use Vite.
Basic comfort with TypeScript. You don’t need to be an expert, but if class Foo implements Bar makes you panic, read a TypeScript crash course first.

You do not need:

Prior RL knowledge. The Algorithms pages cover the theory; the tutorials cover the practice.
A GPU. Everything runs in the browser on whatever WebGPU/WebGL your machine already has.
Python. At all. For anything. Except the one-time ONNX conversion step if you’re deploying outside the browser.

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