STEAM Update breaking bots again?
 

I really get sick of this; last time you could 'fix' this issue by making your liblist.gam read-only. But now it definatly seems to crash the bots. Does anyone know how to fix this?

I know botman posted code, but it was not complete?

:( I don't have any Steam CS running... because Steam keeps wanting me to redownload the CS cache again. Since it's more than 100 Mbytes and I'm behind a solidly slow modem, I've sticked to using Steam with HLDS and TFC only, since they're the only MODs that want to work (well, work, it's a large term though, I need to wait 20 minutes online before I am deigned to be granted a connection to any server).

I'm not surprised of this anyway. Lately it's clearly becoming the official policy of the big guys in the gaming industry to kill any third party coder alive. It's as if they were afraid.

I wonder... is metamod crashing as well ?

i don't know about metamod, none of my users reported such a thing yet.

However, the one that mailed me was as far as i believe also a metamod user... its a fimiliar person on my forum.

The quicker we get independant the better, perhaps even with our own 3D engine, capable of running any game you like.. Quake 1/2/3, Unreal, Half-Life.
Lol that would be a huge project... and a waste of time i think... (besides the time you learn a lot, it is redundant in a way).

News from botmans forums:

Botman posted:

btw, do we LOVE progres?

YES OFCOURSE WE DO!!!!

and do we love STEAM?

as MUCH as we love progres in this matter i would say! :S

aaaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhhhhh

Rofl,

it seems my bot still works with the new CS. I did make changes though to my code, so it will keep on working after the new update.

Anyway, it seems we have 2 sources not to keep up with if we want to keep supporting CS 1.5.

No... not necessarily, do we ?

Have you thought of putting a detection method in GetEntityAPI ? If it detects CS 1.5, it "shortens" the enginefuncs_t interface that is passed away to the engine so as to make it match the "old" interface...

But anyway, why don't you just port the whole crap away to metamod ? 9_9

Yeah! Just let Will Day deal with the madness. LOL

Steam has been dishing out a steady stream of forced beta updates which tend to break our code and do other unpleasant things. If we're to keep working with HL + steam it will have to stabilze to infrequent updates, and the interface has to remain reasonably constant.

I think the people with modems are doomed under steam no matter what.

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Wait... I've already seen that elsewhere :|

a detection method would be possible i guess, but yet again it is strange that valve claims it SHOULD NOT work if you do not update your code... while it does work.

Porting to METAmod, no way. THere are to many people who do not use it, so i don't even want to send them into that big hell of installing more programs and stuff to make one bot work. The principle should be simple and clean, hit install, hit play, and play.

I bet even METAMod cannot keep up the changes of STEAM this fast. Btw, i don't care if i have to update my bot frequently, i won't give up due steam or something. I just find it very annoying.

well, why don't you give away metamod with your bot ? so that metamod is installed with the bot, unless it finds a newer version of the metamod DLL already installed... should be simple, open liblist.gam, and check whether the file that's declared with gamedll exists, and if it's metamod, and whether its a newer version or not. If it is, just add a line in the plugins.ini to point to the bot DLL. If not, install metamod :)

And YES, metamod DOES update very quickly, actually it's the FIRST thing that is updated everytime there's an engine change, because EVERYTHING depends upon it, be it AdminMod, StatsMe, AMX, Cheating-Death, HLStats, W3 Mod, and the myriad of plugins for either of those. How many public servers out there DO NOT run metamod? I'd bet less than 5 percent. Metamod HAS to be up to date, and Will Day is in the best position relatively to the officials at Valve to smell any change in the air. Much better than any of us. As I said once, metamod's popularity can guarantee our bot's viability.

True. METAMod is used pretty often, however the principle remains the same that people have to update their software (metamod/realbot) to get it working again. So in this case it does not matter who updates that quickly, the users still need to update everytime the freaking steam engine changes.

Btw, lets assume users will not find the above thing a problem at all. Don't you dislike the idea that you are depended by another program to make your program work?

I don't like to be depended on very many things, so if i can limit it to 1 thing, STEAM/HL, then i will do so.

Ps. If it looks like i cannot continue with this method in the future, i am open for metamod, but only if a really have to.