[Exilibur]

I'm lost... just completely lost.

I know this is offtopic, but there isn't any "generel bot-talk topic", so i figured and since this isn't about any single bot, i figured that i'd just post here.

So this is my story:

A few days ago, I decided i wanted to play some counter-strike again. Now, the problem is that I'm behind a firewall, and can't play online games, cause my ping reaches 5-600 every two seconds. It's not something i can fix, belive me, I've tried. So after some consideration i decided to do some research on the alternatives.

I've played against bots before, but that's looong ago, back when the androidbot recently were released, so i didn't really know what was hot and what was not, in the bot community. I made some research and found out that nowadays, you were actually able to play against two (or more) different bots in the same game. Cool, I thought and decided that it was something i had to try.

After some time browsing around on messageboards, i finally ended up here, on bots-united. I was eager to start playing, but i wanted to find out which bot's i wanted, and how to install them.

I now found out that many of the bots were designed as a plugin for another plugin called metamod. I figured that in that case i'd better install metamod then. I then found out that in order for metamod to work, I had to install admin mod. I don't know if that assumption is true, and i suspect it isn't, but anyway, that was what i was really convinced of, at that time.

So i went on and installed adminmod, and metamod, and what a pain adminmod is to set up... but after two hours of reading through harsh written manuals, i finally managed to get them to work.

i went on and installed Podbot_mm, and it actually worked, to my big surprise and joy. Looking at how podbod_mm and botman's botmixer5000, i couldn't figure out exactly how they were supposed to act together since botmixer's ini file linked to e.g. //pod PODBot\podbot.dll Which as far as I know, isn't a metamod plugin.

I guessed that since metamod was never, and bot's were converted from normal to metamod, metamod must be better somehow, and from that assumption i concluded that metamod probably supported several different bots. I mean, if i didn't, how was i then supposed to use any of the bot's which were only developed as a metamod plugin?

So I went on yet again and installed realbot, or actually i was going to, but i noticed that it was going to override the liplist.gam file. I'm not stupid. Or at least, i try not to be, and i knew that metamod was added as gamedll in the liplist.gam file, so i installed realbot, but i made sure the liplist file wasn't overwritten, because i knew i needed metamod to run podbot_mm. (oh btw, just to find out which file to download at the realbot download section is a pain)

And of course Realbot didn't work, when i started up the game. Or... actually I knew the dll was loaded, but i couldn't add any bots or anything.

Fine, I though, I'll just backup the liplist file and make the realbot-changes to it. Hurray.... Realbot worked. But podbot_mm didn't, as i suspected. and realbot didn't work that well either, cause the bots kept dying in the beginning of a new round, but i don't think it has anything to do with my changes, so i ignored it, and uninstalled realbot again.

It might have been realbot that was flawed, I though, so i decided to install Joebot. As you might have guessed, that didn't went very well either. Joebot wanted to edit liplist.gam as well, and as usual, i didn't want it to, but that didn't do any good, so i tried letting joebot change the file, but now podbot_mm didn't work... and i figured i had done all this before.

I remembered though, from my first two hour read of the adminmod manual, that it mentioned something about putting a line in the shortcut when you start up a game. It took me some time to actually make a shortcut to counterstrike, cause steam has a habbit of getting in the way of everything, but I managed after some struggling, and added the line: +localinfo mm_gamedll joebot/joebot.dll. and to my big surprice, it didn't work. Yay... But now the game just comes up with an error when i start a game.

So what now?

Well, I think i'm just going to ask you guys for suggestions...

Issue 1:

IS it possible to play against two different bots, using metamod?
IF yes: how?
If no: HOW do i play against e.g. podbot_mm and joebot, if i can't use metamod?

Is there anyone out there who is able to help me?

Issue 2:

I have worked with computers all my life, I know some programming/scripiting, my point is, i'm not new with computers, and I should be pretty capable of isntalling some bots. But it took me TWO freaking days of research to get to this point, where the bot's still dont work! :/
The installation process of bots in counterstrike if you wan't more than one bot, is very untransparent.

I don't want to whine at you guys, doing a great job with you bots, but it's just not very userfriendly, because every single botprogrammer seems to assume that you as the user only want to use one bot. The solution here is not extra help files or long manuals. It's simplicity in the installation process.

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I wrote this to give you guys some insight in what I have been thinking and trying, i my effort to get the bot's to work, and i hope, if nothing else, that somebody is able to help me solve my problem