Porting HPB Bot to work with other mods
 

General consensus is to start a new thread for this.

Hello! For those of you who are unaware, I would very much like to port HPB Bot to Zombie Panic. I find the mod extremely fun, but, I think, for the mod to really hit the big-time in terms of popularity, it needs bots; it is simply not user-friendly enough to start a game out of nowhere and have a horde of zombies ready to go. Unfortunately nobody on the ZP team really bothered with bots, nor does it seem they want to, as they would rather do other things (especially with the impending release of Zombie Panic: Source). Even more unfortunately, I have very little programming experience. My programming experience consists of:

- Some minor PHP coding
- Some TI-82 Calc BASIC
- A little GWBasic back in the day
- mIRC Scripting
- Clickteam Event Scripting

So while I understand what syntax is, if/then/else, setting varibles and etc, I'm not quite there yet to really dive in and take on C++ and know what I'm doing. I have, infact, very little experience on how to work compilers, as well. Fortunately for me, I have been told it is easy to edit a bot, and, considering at this time, I don't have anything to actually lose by learning how to do this, I beseech you, members of the Bots United Agora, to lend me a hand.

What I have done so far: Downloaded both versions of the HPB source - one for the plugin and for the "template" (version 4, I believe). I have been editing the source for the plugin, but upon reading the last reply in my other post, I have come to the conclusion I should have been editing the template version instead.

What I did do on the plugin's source is:

- in h_export.ccp, got rid all the stuff to detect alternate mods like TFC and made ZP identify itself as VALVE_DLL. In turn, I made it load the ZP dll ("zp\\dlls\\mp.dll") instead of the default Half-Life DLL.

- in bot_models.cpp, for VALVE_DLL, the only two models the bot can use are "Survivor" and "Undead" (the two models used in ZP)

- And finally, in bot_weapons.h, I got rid of every VALVE_WEAPON_* except for the ones used by Zombie Panic (Crowbar, Glock, Python, MP5, Shotgun, Hand Grenade and Satchel).

I am absolutely unsure wether or not these were smart ideas or not, but they certainly seemed like it at the time. If I knew how to work a compiler, I could have tested my changes and known in advance wether or not I was a total moron.

So, it comes down to:

- What did I do right? What did I do wrong? What should I be doing instead?

- Which compiler, preferably free, and how? Any attempts to compile (with Mingw, I believe) gave me errors, although in light of seeing I was probably using the wrong source, that's more understandable now.

Re: Porting HPB Bot to work with other mods
 

Wrong forum. Moving to General bot coding. ;)

Btw do you read the botman readme file? In this txt are all the steps that you must do to make HPB to work with this mod. It is not very smart to modify the VALVE_DLL to load the ZP game dll file. Better create new #define for the ZP. After that you must update linkfunc.cpp. Before to edit it read the botman readme file. As I say in this txt is explained step by step what you must do.
For the compiling use MSVC if you have it. If not let the other BU guys explain you how to work with the free compilers because I don't know how. :)

Re: Porting HPB Bot to work with other mods
 

Yeah, sorry about the wrong forum thing. Makes me feel like an idiot.

I skimmed the readme, mainly looking at what compilers I needed to use. He starts getting a bit over my head after that, though, once he stops explaining the method he developed to make bots work (the intermediate DLL stuff). Although, now that I actually have the time to sit down and focus on porting the bot to ZP, I suppose reading the whole thing wouldn't hurt.

Re: Porting HPB Bot to work with other mods
 

I think I can maybe start compiling now, to test my changes out, problem is, I'm not sure how to operate mingw. I try to point Mingw's gcc to the hpb bot makefile, but it says filetype unknown.

Re: Porting HPB Bot to work with other mods
 

I can't help you with mingw. Maybe Whistler or PMB can?

Re: Porting HPB Bot to work with other mods
 

I have some MinGW versions of HPB bot here:
http://filebase.bots-united.com/inde...=category&id=2

You can also use Dev-C++ to edit the source code.

However note that you can only use this version of MinGW, any newer versions will NOT work.

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/m...1.exe?download

If you are using Dev-C++, you can delete the include and lib directory in Dev-C++ folder and install this version of MinGW to your Dev-C++ folder, overwrite the original files.