[Pierre-Marie Baty]

That's where my point is, but let's not be fooled by our experience!

To me (the usual weirdo) there is absolutely NO difference between the metamod interface that Will Day and Alfred Reynolds came up with, and the DLL hook method that botman first imagined for the HPB_bot, which, let's say it again, WAS a crafty hack. The goal was exactly the same, in extenso add bots to an engine/game DLL pair to none of which we had the source code!

Today we are so much used to Half-Life, Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat because of years of experience with our bots that we could almost rewrite these MODs from scratch without a single look at their source code - which we never had a chance to look at anyway. Isn't that true ?

When we'll start with HL2, but ALSO when we'll start with Unreal/QuakeIII/Far Cry/insert-your-favourite-game-here, we'll be at the SAME point where we were a few years ago. The only thing we know are techniques of AI coding. But the way these games work, their internals, how to hook them and how to force them to do what we want, will be completely sibyllin to us.

We'll have no idea on how to get the polygons from the HL2 map files to build a navmesh either.

We'll have no idea on how the new entity system will work.

We'll have no idea on how a particular MOD will make its clients interact in the client-server relationship.

We'll have no idea on how to hook on sounds

All this WITHOUT the MOD's source code

In this regard, excuse me but I don't see how writing an advanced bot for HL2 will be easier than writing one for Unreal, one for QuakeIII, one for Far Cry, etc. ?

Please enlighten me here.