[botmeister]

No I was not entirely joking about the disk I/O communications idea.

On a relatively slow 850 Mhz machine running Win2K I can read from a text file 649,520 bytes in .02 seconds,and I can write the same amount to a text file in about 0.14 seconds.

You have to remember that the reaction times of a bot are in the 1/100 (0.01) of a second at best, which is *very* slow for a modern day desktop computer. We can probably get away with many reaction functions in 1/10 of a second range, or even longer. Only a few tasks, such as aiming and firing weapons will require the lowest reaction times.

How much data needs to be transfered per frame at 100 farmes per second is the big question, from there we can calculate if the concept is feasible or not. If it is, then we'll have a relatively universal communications method between the game and the bot. Of course enough games must allow efficient disk I/O from their scripting language. If basic disk I/O is not available then it is hard to imagine that scripting languages will provide us with anything that is more sophisticated.

edit:

We may also be able to perfom compression/decompression on the data that is exchanged to further reduce disk I/O times.

edit again:

Also, how fast (or slow) is communications through TCP/IP over 100 MB LAN? I can tell you it is a lot slower than local disk I/O.