Metamod simplifies a lot of things. However I suggest to get used to HL programming in general first because of all the game-specific tricks you need to know and that you can learn only by working them out. The ideal would be to hack out botman's bots for a short while, then move to metamod and start writing something clean (as in botman's code, with all respect we owe to our guru, it's clearly a mess sometimes
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