How do i slow down bots' reaction speed?
 

Hi!

PodBot MM are really cool, they behave nicely and even confuse guest players who think they are human players. Thank you for great bots!

But for serious gaming PodBot MM has one feature that distinguishes bots from real players and spoils both game enjoyment and impression about bots:

Bots' reaction is too quick.

Human's reaction speed is 0.3 to 0.5 seconds, it may be reduced to 0.2 seconds when concentraded. But bots attack instantly when they suddenly face an enemy in front of them.

Yes, they take time to turn, but when you jump out in front of bot's face, you will 100% get a load of lead before you could react. And this doesn't depend on distance, only on angle to bot's view direction.

A common man can never react that quick.

So the question is:

How do i increase bots' reaction time to 200-300 ms?

PS Some small questions:
1) Are PodBot's waypoints compatible with PodBot MM? Can't find waypoints for cs_mansion. :(
2) Bots use camp spots badly: they never look around, their field of view becomes very narrow and (on default maps with default waypoints) they never look in the direction needed, they look on a wall or floor... Is it because of bad waypoints?
3) Can i make some points to be main routes and some to be used rarely? I hate it when on de_aztec round start CTs run to bombplace through their gates, 50% of them jump into water instead of attacking T's gate.

Re: How do i slow down bots' reaction speed?
 

My PodBot MM version is 16c, the second problem seems to be already fixed in latest build. ^_^

Re: How do i slow down bots' reaction speed?
 

You can lower down their skill. You don't need to use bots with skill (100) all the time - try with bots skill (80). The reaction time is defined in botskill.cfg - read that file for more details.


You can use them, but only camp waypoints may work wrong (they will look in strange direction). You can just remove these camp waypoints and place the new ones by WP editor. More info about that You can find in docs.
Hint - use the console command:
pb wp teleport camp
It will teleport You to the next camp WP - so You don't need to walk across all the map to find all camp WPs.

One part for that has been fixed in V3B18b/c (I don't remember exact number), bt they still sometimes look at the floor (which needs to be fixed for any of next releases).

They are trying to choose the path according to their agressivity level (which may be changed according to the health, killed enemies by them etc). More aggresive bots are not afraid too much and they are trying to choose the shortest path to the goal. Neutral aggesivity level bots are trying to find the consensus between geometrical length of the path and its danger. The small agression bots (most scaried ones) they are trying to find the safest path (might be even sometimes really long geometrically). The danger of the path depands of how many damages/kills the bots of the team got in the past near any waypoint.
The people think if they place some T or CT specific waypoint somewhere the bots will try to use more often that path. It's not working exactly so. T or CT specific WP it's a kind of goal WP the bot of the team is trying to reach. To go ahead from that WP the bot will choose another "goal" WP - which may be really "goal", team specific WP, camp WP. I think - You may try to remove any team specific WPs from the places You don't want to be visited too much by them, and You can place them near the places You want they should go.

Re: How do i slow down bots' reaction speed?
 

Thank you for a detailed reply! I've found the vars i wanted.

Oh gosh... After upgrading to the latest PodBot MM (from 16c) the bots got much more difficult. They shoot at me from distance very accurately and agressively. Formerly, they were dangerous only in close fights. Is it the botskill.cfg vars raised or the algorithm tuned up? On 16c i needed 100-skill bots to have real fun, now 90 is too much for me (with default botskill.cfg).