[botmeister]

Looks grim for at least the games botman mentions. Are they any other games worth researching?

It may still be worth building the UB, but IMO not for commercial games.

There was some talk of building our own game template which would provide 3rd party bot support by design, and provide many other services by design which are not seen in commercial games (and probably never will be seen). Some of the concepts disucssed for the UB would apply directly to the game template idea.

I would not consider building our own game engine, but instead make use of existing open source, or "free" commercial, game engines.

The same idea of game drivers would provide an interface between the game template and the engine. The same idea of plugins could then be constructed to provide all the essential services which make up a full featured FPS game. A UB would seemlessly plug into the game template providing "by design" 3rd party bot support (for the first time ever). Imagine what you could do with such an interface?

The plugin concept will allow anyone to develop components for the game, with collaboration among developers. The template will enforce standards on the developers, and provide a form of "automated collaboration" (so to speak).

I may be crazy to even suggest such a thing, but if we don't do something radically different, we'll be stuck with the same old worn out problems and limitations forever.