[botman]

I would think there would still be some engine internal network traffic that would attempt to be sent to clients (for things like spray logo decals, for example). The engine internal traffic might not always come from game DLL function calls. The engine always used to use the FL_FAKECLIENT field to determine if a client didn't have a network connection. Older versions of the engine would crash when network packets were attempted to be sent to fake clients, but I think Alfred (or Leon) at Valve went through all of the places where network messages could be sent and made sure that the engine didn't attempt to sent network traffic to clients that didn't have a network connection.

If things seem to run fine (without crashing) when you are NOT using FL_FAKECLIENT, then you probably don't need to worry about adding it back in, but if you start getting a lot of complaints about increased network lag on servers running lots of bots, you might need to add it back. A simple test would be to create a server with 20 bots and see if your loopback network connection suddenly has a lot higher latency. Turn on the 'netstat' thing to see network load ("netstat 3", I think it is).

botman