[DrEvil]

I may be the only one that thinks developing an engine independant system isn't all its cracked up to be.

As has already been said, implementations from engine to engine vary so widely even after heavy abstraction there would be alot of changes required to use the bot in another engine.

Halflife is the only engine that supports such easy bot development, by allowing the bot to be a pass through dll basically. You want quake bots? Last I checked you either built them into the mods themselves or you're SOL if the mod authors decide not to care about bot support, which so many of them do. Unreal engine is out of the question too. Unless you become a licensee, you're not getting access to the source code. What's that leave us? Next to no engine other than halflife with this sort of ability. Engine independance is a fairy tale in my opinion, and effort should be put more towards a strong framework by several bot devs. I don't expect many if any at all future games to have halflifes level of access either.

I certainly think that a strong framework should be built for halflife bots, one that is preferably object oriented and once developed can be expanded easily to other mods with ease, and different programmers can work on different mods simultaneously.

I think lessons could be learned about the design of Unreal. Ever noticed that like 75% of the mods released for UT2003 come with bot support, while some pathetically small amount for halflife and quake come with it? That's due to the brilliant OOP design of the bots in Unreal. I think effort should be made to do something similar. Everything in Unreal Script is classes. Want a new type of sniper rifle? Derive a class from sniper rifle, overload the necessary properties and functions and you now have a new weapon. Same for bots. Got a new game type? Derive from the existing bot type, override the necessary functions to get the bot to do your gametype specific actions. It's practically a no-brainer for people and bot support to their mods.

Anyways, back on track, just wanted to give my opinion on the matter. I't sure would be cool to have a bot that is engine independant, but looking at it realistically leads me to think that you're still going to be pretty much completely restricted to halflife/halflife2 still.