[botman]

"Botman, which was the diagnostic you had to make of our current situation that led you to submit this idea ?"

It will be difficult to do anything more than a very simple bot for most other engines. Unreal has the disadvantage of only being able to use UnrealScript (which is slow). I have my doubts about being able to pass data back and forth between the Unreal game application and some other application running externally. The biggest limitation in Unreal is the lack of being able to parse the map files automatically (there's no source code available that allows you to open an Unreal map and determine locations of objects and/or polygons in that level). The only way Unreal maps could be parsed is to open the level manually in UnrealEd and save the map out in text format.

As far as any other engines, I have no knowledge about whether bots are even possible in any of them. I've seen some news posts about bots in BF1942. I know that QuakeIII supports bots (but haven't seen any bots implemented outside of the engine's existing bot code). I know for a fact that other games (like Halo PC for example) can NEVER have bots because the engine just doesn't support the concept of fake clients (even though people claim dropping AI monsters in Halo multiplayer maps is bots, it ain't).

I did talk to someone at Valve and confirmed that HL2 will support fake clients (bots). I was told that the Official Counter-Strike bot written for Condition Zero is already up and running the HL2 ported version of Counter-Strike. I was also told that it should be a little easier to work with bots in the HL2 engine (than it was in the HL1 engine).

My thought was that it's better to make a damn good bot for a handful of MODs on one engine (and support every possible feature of each of those MODs) than it is to make a moderately good bot that runs on several different engines (especially if you have to compromise on one engine just to make it workable on several other engines).

botman