Preview of some Fritz related things.....
 

The readme as it currently stands (suggestions are welcome!).

Re: Preview of some Fritz related things.....
 

The .bot file - where a particular bots traits are stored.

NOTE: the fritz.bot file was renamed to fritz.txt to upload onto the forum....

Re: Preview of some Fritz related things.....
 

A pic of a node in the world, and its connections. I'm still working on a better system of visualising these things, but this is what I have so far.

Re: Preview of some Fritz related things.....
 

"A pic of a node in the world, and its connections"
... but are you able to make use of the AAS function in the engine, which is used in RTCW single player AI code (from the RTCW SDK source code I currently have) ?

Re: Preview of some Fritz related things.....
 

Heres a pic of the BOT DEBUG HUD - a useful tool to find out what the bot is thinking.

I borrowed the naming conventions the Q3 bot used (LTG = Long Term Goal, NBG = Near By Goal).

Fritz has several levels of goals, which can all be run at the same time (ex: getting the flag, and healing a friend may exist as goals at the same time in Fritz's mind, with different priorities, depending on some key factors).

Fritz's A.I. is goal based A.I., i.e. he moves about in the world with a goal or purpose in mind, not just random, frame based choices.

Re: Preview of some Fritz related things.....
 

The AAS trap calls are broken in the Multiplayer source - try them for yourself.

Fritz's pathing is NOT based on AAS in any way. Its node based (tho I would like to explore Navmesh someday).

Re: Preview of some Fritz related things.....
 

Just a question, where did you started with ?

I mean, was there some sort of bot template available already or did you have to start from the raw SDK ? :)

Re: Preview of some Fritz related things.....
 

Raw SDK, tho I used a fellow Q3 coder's (name is fretn) bot spawning code as a rough guide to get the bots to be able to spawn into RTCW. I worked on Fritz alone, tho I did get help from time to time from other coders in the Q3 community (like fretn). If you check out the fritz.doc that I put up above, you'll see I credit the people who helped out and what they did.

I didn't like the way fretn spawned bots into RTCW tho - he treated his bots like an entity (used think, nextthink and everything) I don't like to "fake" that the bot is a client like that - makes things difficult, and your constantly worrying about whether the bot looks human while its doing something.

Fritz IS a client to the game, he can't do anything a client can't. THAT took quite a while to figure out how to do!

It took me quite a few weeks to get bots to spawn into the game without timing out, or crashing - then the REAL trick was getting them to stay in the maps when the map restarted. Fretn used a trick where he'd kick them, then re-add them the next round. I don't - Fritz actually stays in the game like a client (or in this case - a bot ;) ).

I've been kicking the idea around of making a bot template like botman did, but completely stripped of A.I. - for the RTCW community, just enough code to get them into the game and working like clients, and let people take it from there.

Don't know tho, I'm so busy ATM..... :(

Re: Preview of some Fritz related things.....
 

sounds interesting. A template will surely unleash some more RTCW bots. Or make it possible to have people get bots into other mods... (IF those mods are open-source, OR... they implement your template into their source).

Couple screenies of the bot in action
 

Heres me and my team losing. Everyone in this pic, except me (with the 0 ping), is a bot.

As you can see, the scores are pretty spread out - like humans on a pub server.

The bots even have a fake ping (it doesn't affect them, its just for looks)! :)

Pics converted to black and white to give it a WW2 feel...

Re: Couple screenies of the bot in action
 

Heres me and my team winning. :)

Re: Preview of some Fritz related things.....
 

Some nice impressions, Maleficus! =) I haven't read the docs yet, but a few things came to my mind immediately:
- About the node visualisation: I don't know if there are several types of nodes, but even if it's only one type, different colours will be helpful, I think. Having nodes and connections (I assume those horizontal lines are connections) all in red might not be the best choice.
- That fake ping thingy is a really nice idea! Me likes. :) Is it difficult to code or very game-specific? I'm asking because fake pings would be a nice addition to all those CS bots as well... ;)
- The system with LTG and NBG reminds me of Pierre's RACCBot; he has adopted a similar system there. Well, it makes sense...

Oh, and I read that news item about FritzBot you posted in the other thread - hopefully it will attract more people to BU!

Re: Preview of some Fritz related things.....
 

from your Readme:

"TeamWhore and the now defunct(??) Ubersoldat AI mod team for their A* path algorithm"

We're not defunct , just very slow:D

Anyway, stop by our new forum somtime, ubersoldat.forumer.com and say hello and good luck with your mod.

Re: Preview of some Fritz related things.....
 

HEY!! :)

I was afraid your mod had died - the webpage hadn't been updated for over a month and the forums had vanished for as long! 8o

Good to hear you guys are still around. :)

Maybe between the two mods, we can get some kind of bot community built up for the RTCW community. ;)

RE: Wrecks:

Yea, I know about the nodes visualization. Its something I'm working on still, and yes - there IS more than one kind of node, I just have a cmd that will print the info and node type in the console for me ATM, but it will be improved and make more user friendly.

I don't know how HL/CS work enough to know if its possible to adjust the ping for bots in CS (I thought I heard it wasn't). In Wolf, its as easy as setting the bots ping to what I want in the game, every so many frames:

bot->client->ps.ping = <some random number>

Now, this will only show up in the game, if you ping the server from outside, you won't see the fake pings, but thats not really a worry. ;)

Re: Preview of some Fritz related things.....
 

BTW: I've updated the readme to include the forum address, and took out the "defunct" part. :)

For those who don't know, UberSoldat is another bot mod for RTCW. It started back in March of this year, and for a month or so seemed to be going strong. I contributed bits of code to them here and there (nothing major, but some fun stuff), then they seemed to suddenly dropped off the face of the planet last May. :(

I never did find out what happened to them, until today. :)

Ubersoldat is an objective bot - which means it plays the objective mode in RtCW (which is quite fun!).

Which is different than Fritz, which is a Capture Point bot, and only plays that mode (which is REALLY fun).


Cheers!