[botman]

This has been discussed before, but little or no work was actually made publicly available. I think part of the reason behind the "failure" of early attempts was that, if nothing is ever released, everyone will lose interest.

I suggest that, as a group, you spend only a small amount of time designing what the template should be then, spend a little bit of time building an EXTREMELY simple prototype and release it to the public (with the understanding that it will constantly be improved upon).

That was basically what I did with the HPB bot when it first came out. The first HPB bot couldn't shoot, couldn't navigate around intelligently, couldn't handle specific jobs (like planting a bomb, capturing a flag, etc). But the important thing was that it was AVAILABLE for anyone to download and begin working with (even when there were problems getting bots to spawn properly in Counter-Strike, which was fixed by DaTa from the old Android bot).

So my suggestion is, don't spend 3 or 4 months designing something and then spend another 6 months trying to have a completely finished and fully functioning bot, because everyone (including the developers) will lose interest in it before it is available to the pubilc. Do something simple just to prove the concept and then keep constanly making improvements.

I have quite a bit of knowledge in the Unreal world now and would be a good resource for providing information and code in the Unreal engine (perhaps I would take on the task of "Lead Unreal Developer").

More disussion...