[botman]

"By the way, botman, would you for a chance have heard of / do you know some basic bot templates for these engines available somewhere to download ? (even extremely basic"

I'm not aware of any 3rd party bots for Unreal or Quake III since both of these games come with bots included. I'm thinking that since the developer of these games included bots with them that very few people would have the desire to create their own bots for those games.

Also, a comment about entities in the game. I don't think it's a good idea to try to abstract the game engine data (entities, the data structures for the world geometry, etc) since every engine will handle these differently. There should be no need for the bot core code to know anything about what's in the world. The core code should only be concerned with calling a predefined set of functions that are geared toward getting the bot to do a specific task ("see things", "hear things", "select a weapon", "fire a weapon", etc.). Each individual bot function should have the engine specific knowledge about how to get things from the world and how to interpret those things. This obviously means that all of these functions are going to be engine specific.

If you try to generalize things too much up front, you will quickly find that there's lots of special cases for each engine that don't fit the generalization model that you've chosen. Also, MODs for each engine will have there own brand new, unexpected types of entities that can't have been planned for in the generalized design.

There's nothing wrong with having engine specific code in each of the bots functions. There can still be generic code that all the bots use to handle common tasks (such as an A* path finding function, some function that generates a navigation mesh based on a list of polygon vertices, a function that provides realistic human-like weapon aiming, etc.). But none of the generic code should make ANY assumptions about things that are engine specific (such as what entities there are in the world, how a weapon fires its ammo, whether a bot has the ability to fly or not, etc.)

botman