[botman]

Since all of the bot developers here have HL1 experience, I was thinking it would be neat to take all that combined knowledge and create a United Bot for the Half-Life2 universe (and not try to support any other engine, just HL2).

Gabe has stated that Valve has ported HL1 MODs to the HL2 engine (TFC, CS, DoD, etc). I imagine the gameplay of those ports will be pretty much identical to the HL1 version except with new maps (possibly larger worlds), and some additional goodness resulting from the new physics system (using Havok), for example, barrels or crates that you can push down on top of people, doors that can be blasted open, etc.

I'm hoping that Valve will also have standard deathmatch with HL2 weapons (like the manipulator gun), but this is yet to be seen.

I can e-mail some key people at Valve to confirm whether HL2 will support fake clients (bots). I'm pretty sure Valve wouldn't leave out this feature since they spent so much time and money getting the Official Counter-Strike bot added to HL1. It would just make sense to port that code over to CS on HL2 as well.

NOTE: I'm pretty sure we won't get the HL2 SDK before anyone else (so don't even ask about that), but there's plenty of generic bot design that can be done before the HL2 SDK and engine is released. I would imagine we would want a navigation mesh type navigation system (since waypoints are big pain in the buttocks to create and automatic waypointing just doesn't do a very good job). We will also need to be able to handle some of the more dynamic things in the HL2 universe (like obstacles being moved around), so there should be some provision for steering around obstacles that aren't shown in the nav-mesh.

Let me know you thoughts on this and perhaps we can simplify the United Bot problem by sticking to a single engine, but supporting the major MODs that show up for HL2.

botman