So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

I've been in a self-inflicted coma for the past few years and have only just clawed my way out of the depths of hellfire and damnation to see it has gone nuclear and vanished on me. Pray tell - did anyone survive?

Sadbloke.

Born again Christian :innocent:

(joke)

:single fuck:

But seriously where is everyone?

(just don't ask me where I've been as it's a deeply unsatisfying answer. One where I proceed to hit you over the head with a large object forcing you to vow never to ask again)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Aux let the domain expire, as the site was generally inactive, I think. It's been a while. Maybe years. I forget.

(DGH says hi.)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

I am here, with my coffee-cup ;)

But I miss Nuclearbox...it was a nice place!

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

yes, especially funny place when the US were starting some war *g* ...

well, never checked that site since some years actually ...

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

yeah, i do remember those times. Especially when things got grim.

Never thought i would see you again SadBloke! :D

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Hey guys :)

Heh, I remember the site taking a collective nosedive after those terrorist attacks on 9/11. Members dropped like flies each week :D Some good ones too unfortunately :(

Still it had a good run.

I'm sure you did! :clown:

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Hey !

Time for a re-union I guess ;)
I'm kind of missing nukebox & old Auxois too...does someone know what he's up to lately ?

Btw. somebody took my handle on these forums...

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Hi Markus! (If you are the real one ;) )
How are you, do you still work in the Gaming Buis ? :arabia:

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Heyyo,

Wow, the real Count Floyd? that's awesome! Heyyo man, welcome to bots united! :D

Nuclearbox is gone and done for.. not sure why, but it was in a horrible state.. people on the forums flamed, so I left, and a few months later I decided to check on it and it was just gone.. that was at least a few years ago.

But Count Floyd, I remember hearing after the start of work on PodBot v3.0, you were hired to make the CZ bot, but then that got transferred to TurtleRock Studios and your bot work was lost, is that true? I remember hearing some great previews of your work.

Then last I heard you were making the AI for a cowboy and indians rts, is that true as well??

Just wondering what one of the original CS bot geniuses is up to is all. :P

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Thanks guys & hi to all the others who still remember me.
I've been to troublesome times a lot the past years, the short version here:
Yes, my work on the CZ Bot was given away when Gearbox transfered the Project. Dunno if anything was used, I doubt it however seeing that CZ was released in a very different state to the one @ gbx.
Yes, I've been working on America 2, a western rts game but I ran out of luck again when the publisher decided to close his game development section :(
In between both of my parents got very sick and I was quickly running out of money almost becoming homeless & living from social security.
The past 4 years (is it really that long before?) I've been recovering and had lots of good times too when I met my current girlfriend and quit all the game biz stuff. Since then I became a (boring?) software engineer programming e-government software in C# & ASP.net which is more fun than you might believe. I've never lost interest in AI and especially Bots so I've always been lurking around, following this forum as well but most of the time I've been too lazy or short on time to register here and add my 5 cents. Every now & then I even extended my FPS AI Engine which I'm still working on after these years, just doing this for the fun of it and of course because I believe that a lot of nowadays bots are still as dumb as 1 century ago :)
Just ask me what I implemented so far to fill up a huge feature list, hehe...
Well, so much about me...what are you guys up to nowadays ?
What I read is that:
Johannes (still rowing along in Finland?)
Pierre (creating his own company with his bros?)
Stefan (being a software engineer ?)
William (still being Consultant?)

other guys I lost track off...

PS: Just had quite a funny feeling in my stomach posting this, 1st time sinc e 5 or 6 years ? Damn...I'm still bad at social networking!

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Great to hear, that you are here again!

p.s Please, let us read the feature list ;)

:clap:

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Hello there Markus, damn nice to see you are back in bot territory! 8) Sorry to hear about your parents, and your problems, but I am glad you are recovering!

I am sure it roxors your boxors ;)

And I'm still living in Delsbo, Sweden, drinking MUCH coffee, and many beers of course, but not at the same time! :) And listening to good old bluesmusic! Have studied to be a "optical fiber technician" (damn, haven't a good english translation, and I guess you haven't learn swedish yet? ;) ) and I just quit a job at Ericsson Network Technologies where I worked with optical fiber (or fibre) for fast broadband, so I'm now looking for a new job.

Same here, I will dedicate my next cup of coffee to all great people I've met a Nuclearbox! :) I really miss those days, so it's time for Bots United to change name to Nuclearbox 2 or something ;) Nice to see that some of us getting together here!

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Here are also some people they got banned by Auxois because of different political opinions, so they probably will not approve changing the name of bots-united into nuclearbox 2 (it's not about me). :)


Let us know , Markus, what are Your plans - are You going to code some new bot (and You need some sub-forum here for it) or You are not thinking You will have time to develop anything? Another thing - because some stupid guy has reserved Your nick already at this forum, but he seems to be inactive since some time, we can ask BU admin to delete his account and thus You will be able to use Your normal nick without (4real) sufix if You wish so.

BTW - don't You think guys this topic should be moved (with a redirect) to Offtopic forum?

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Ok, rename it to Coffee House then! ;)

Yes, agree to that, not much RealBot talk in this thread :)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

hi count floyd !

welcome back.

unfortunately I'm not any more in finland, back in germany since middle of september. well, finishing studies and so on.

gotta work, partied to much yesterday, i'll look more often in here and post maybe something more, let's see what comes

Johannes

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Yay Count Floyd( I still remember the days playing CS 1.3 and PodBot 2.5 and waited for the never released 3.0 version), nice you are back online, I hope that you will get in touch with the communiti like years ago. :)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Heyyo,

Lol, I still remember in CS1.3 how PodBot v2.0 had the proper view panning, not instant-godlike-turns to ya, and PodBot v2.5 had an error in the skill.cfg which was supposed to have a different name but the game didn't treat it that way, so they did the instant-turn to you, and there was a custom skill.cfg that fixed it. :P

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Good old memories, the problem was that PB 2.0 wasn't able to save hostages and 2.5 wasn't able to plant the bomb correct from time to time. :)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

2.5 was crashing when someone killed a hostage. :)
Hey guys - don't You really remember it was the most popular bot anyway (even of all these bugs)?
Beacuse Markus released his sources, we still could get excited by new features of the bot - about 4 clones of podbot were started their lifes. :)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Heyyo,

True, then PMB released his kickass plugins for PODbot 2.5 which helped it out quite a bit, and there was the other one.. can't remember the name.. but it was pretty darn good too, made the bots much more efficient snipers.

Yeah, true, but like I said, those plugins made it pretty leet. :)

CF, if you ever make a CSS bot that could destroy the turtle rock studios bot I'd be laughing ti'll the next millenia..

speaking of bots for source, they updated the sdk, did they make third party bot support better too?

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

(Sorry for the late reply but as I told you I'm short on time & posting this from my working place)

@ KWO:

Thanks for the offer but I don't need a forum because the current Bot is more of a toy to me for trying out stuff. I doubt it will ever see the light of day and if so it won't be in this year or for the Half-Life Engine. Btw. it's good that you're paranoid about me, that makes you a great forum admin (honestly!). You might however check my given e-mail and verify with one of the 'old' guys that this is still my old one (just ask Bluesman, Johannes etc.).
Seeing the other guy was just impersonating me for some 2 or 3 posts and since he's inactive, yes I'd like to take over my old handle.

@ Bluesman:
Nice hearing from you too. Sorry about your job I know it's kind of hard these days, over the past years I had a couple of exotic jobs myself to be able to keep my smoking (bad) habit ;)
I just told Johannes, my old e-mail is still valid so if you still have it, feel free to write, otherwise I've got your old one but I don't know if that's still working...

@ others:
I need to finish posting here, got to work but I'll write more later...

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

User names fixed - now the real Count Floyd is with his real nickname. :)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Thank you ! Feels much better now...

(lunch break here so I can post a bit more)

I would like to somewhat revive the bot coding section seeing that these forums are so quiet and there aren't any other forums (except gamedev) I know of which are active.
Over the years it dawned on me that almost all in (game) ai is about navigation & representation. So I'd like to share some insights and/or problems I've stumbled over and start a hopefully interesting discussion.

Ok, it's back to work for me...l8er!

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Ha, ha. I'm not an admin here, but thanks anyway. :D
Yes - You have been authenticated by 3 persons (SoUlFaThEr, Bluesman and Aspirin) before You posted the last post here, so that's OK for me. I had to go this way since I never was any possibility to talk to You directly, so I haven't had any possibility to authenticate You my-self. :)

Regardless what You are planning we are glad You finally joined our community. :)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Hey welcome back Floyd! Sorry to read about your real life troubles but sounds like that's behind you now which is good to hear. It's a pity the kind of artificial intelligence you guys created in your spare times eclipses the level of AI in retail games by such a large degree. Was playing Crysis the other week and the one thing that struck me was that it'd be almost perfect in sandbox mode if the enemies were actually engaging (which they aren't).

RealBot and (later versions of) NNBot ftw :punk:

(sorry, just thought I'd pick up where I left off :devil2:)

...but it was definitely one of the best bots generally speaking sure :sleep: total fucker to play against though.

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Heyyo,

Lol, I remember messing around with some of the dev/cheat modes in PODbot 2.5, like the one where the bot's AI would assume control of you and such, I used that lan before when I had to go to the bathroom and my cousin was just screaming "HACKS!!" at me.. pfft, even without PODbot's help I was still pwning him, lol. :P

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Hehe, no Teambot from Elite all the way ! Oh and that mysterious Bot (was it called Squadbot?) from DarkYouth which never saw the light of day ;)
Btw. I've seen a Students Thesis using Teambot as a Base to try out better (not really!) chat dialogues with human gamers. As if some of the existing Bots didn't have such a thing in their standard installation...it's a pity we couldn't really fake the displayed ping for bots :)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

About commercial AI like Crysis:
Just yesterday I witnessed a glitch in BioShock (which uses the UT 3 Engine with NavMeshes & Stuff AFAIK) where a Big Daddy wanted to repeatedly walk thru a pillar standing right in the middle of a room. And there wasn't a failure timer or something, he just went on & on. The security bots have lots of navigation issues as well but that's probably because of the 2.5D Presentation of the underlying NavMesh. Anyway, shows that Navigation is still a main issue.

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Hi!
@ Markus: Dark Youth had a bot called *cough* S.W.A.T Bot.

Have a nice day! w00t

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Instead double posting, You can use "Edit" button to edit Your last post. :)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Speaking of mysterious bots...I remember a user on nukebox called T-BONE, that was gonna make "kickin' ass-extravaganza-super bot" that would rule the world...but we never saw a proof of that bot :)

I also remember the millions of private messages I got, when people was told on the boards that I had the PODBot WIP-version from Count Floyd:

"Please, can I have it also!!!!"
"GIVE IT TO ME OR I WILL KILL YOU SLOWLY"
"Please, send the WIP to me, Count Floyd don't need to know anything about it"
"I think the WIP-bot is a hoax, send it to me if you have it..."
"I give you free coffee for a year, if you send the WIP to me"

Haha...those where the days! :)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

yes, WIP versions were great. but my bot's nickname was speedbot during that time for some people anyway, there werent any WIPs at first, because there was anyway an update every 2nd day :)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Hi! :)
@Bluesman: Yes, i remember T-Bone :)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Wow, lots of stuff happened. And great to see CF is on Bots-United! Welcome (back)!

I certainly hope things are going better (and keep going better) now for ya.

Looks like you're not the only one who got himself a 'boring' software engineering job. In fact I enjoy it very much as well. It is not AI and C/C++ but simply coding my webapps in Java are fun indeed.

I did try to bring up a new release of RB a while ago, but it is majorly flawed. And i think we all know the factor "time" is not on our side. Still finding someone who is willing to pay sallery for a day so i can use that day for bot-coding ;-)

Btw, did you guys knew i had a job-offer from Crytek years ago? It was for FarCry in those days. I declined in that time. 3 years later i had another chance but did not take it as well. I don't know why, but it feels good i did that. At the same time i wonder how it would be if i did take the chance.

Anyhow, I am married now, bought a house a few months back. I am now trying to get my Informatica degree in evening school.

I also played Crysis and saw some failures, most certainly with scripting. Some time i was waiting for Prophet who would give me his gun and get cover. He did not do anything but the timer went down and he died. I had to play that part 5 to 10 times before it went right (the scripting that is) so i could go on. Frustrated me a lot. :cursing:

I am wondering about these new insights you have CF regarding AI. In the past few years things did not really get more exciting, though the marketing tells us differently.

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Yes, I remember the discussion with T-Bone too. Back then I remember him having some nukebox guys so much persuaded that they started to blame us for him not releasing anything.
At least 3 or 4 bot coders got this offer from them AFAIK. For example Johannes & me were mailed too, do you remember ? However they probably got a more than fitting substitute reading his articles (don't remember his name) in AI Wisdom etc. I don't regret it neither.
No new insights I'm afraid :)
However over the years I tried a lot and could do a list of what works and what not. It might help people just starting & it would be good to have some infos in a concentrated way. I myself also still have questiions which are unclear to me but as you wrote so much to do but so few time ;)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

As long as it is robust. I am all-in ;-)

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Count Floyd?! damn, must be a zombie.

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

No. 3 different persons authenticated him for me. :D

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Welcome to Bots-United SadBloke and Count Floyd! It's been a while indeed. Brings back some good memories about some years with lots and lots of waypointing:)

In case anyone cares, I am working as Level Designer for IO Interactive(www.ioi.dk) these days.

Re: So whatever happened to the Nuclearbox?
 

Heyyo,


That's kickass! So when is IO going to make another hitman game, and invent some amazing multiplayer modes for it!? :)
Like, take the AS_ vip escort mode of CS, change it up a bit, and I think tha'd be wicked.