[botman]

I've been doing some research into adding a non-UnrealScript bot in UT2k3/2k4 and it doesn't look like there's any way to use C++ code with an Unreal MOD. You used to be able to do this with the old Unreal Tournament, but UT2k3 doesn't have the .h header files necessary to create your own DLL files from compiled C++ code.

Any bot code created for UT2k3/2k4 will HAVE to be written in UnrealScript (which limits you to what types of world geometry you have access to) and UnrealScript is about 20 times slower than compiled C++ code.

I was going to investigate how much was possible with Quake III as far as replacing the bot code with your own code, but I can't seem to find my copy of Quake III Arena (I can download the Q3 demo, but the demo doesn't allow MODding). I did a Google search for alternative Q3 bots and didn't find anything except discussions on ai-depot.com about someone trying to find an open source Quake III bot (which there was none). It's been a while (5+ years) since I did anything with Quake, but I do remember that all Quake II MODs had to be written in Quake C. I know that with Quake III, DLL file support was added, but I'm not sure if MOD makers would create their own DLLs or if they were still limited to Quake C for their MOD source code.

Knowing these limitations, it will be next to impossible to create a bot with any amount of shared code that will work in Half-Life, UT2k3, and Quake III.

botman