hehehehe

[Rifleman]

how about make the file "read-only" ? I remember STEAM wont overwrite the liblist.gam file if we set it to read-only mode

[stefanhendriks]

you mean HL2 has the DLL inside the gcf file? I find that pretty odd! I remember CS 1.6 (steamed as well) had a seperated DLL and also CZ too... i dunno about CSS. It does have a seperated directory, but i dunno if the dll is too... that would be enough? ..

[Whistler]

well the Steam will just extract the dll out of the gcf file every time we start the game...
and the bad thing is that we can't change the name of dll in liblist.gam for the HL2 engine, the name is hardcoded as "bin\server.dll"

[stefanhendriks]

but how do other mods work then? They do have a liblist.gam right?

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

I wouldn't worry, Whistler, as I know for almost certain that the Valve guys planned (maybe they've done it, or maybe not yet) to implement hook abilities for third-party plugins, in the metamod style. It WILL be possible to add third-party plugins to Source games, they told it themselves.

[Whistler]

well from what I have seen in my saved copy of CS:S beta version, the liblist.gam in HL2 is only for the name of the MOD (e.g., "Counter-Strike", "Half-Life", etc). You can specify the name of the game DLL in it.

[stefanhendriks]

I am trying to strip my own bot very naked to get the principe 'engine independant' working. I can compile and run it now in CS and it does nothing but running. I can't even spawn a bot yet.

The problem is, i figured that we rely on METAMOD now. On HL 2 we DO NOT have METAMOD! Unless someone from Valve releases something like that, or we have some miracle we can just hook up to the dll and find all functions ourselves, writing an interace for the bot dll will be difficult.

Anyone thought about that?

[stefanhendriks]

I have taken a closer look at the RACC new code. I got confused by this principle:

At start you try to catch as less network messages as possible. Doing some loops and check out the entity state of the Hl engine, updating your own entity list. Thats fair and thats logical imo.

Later on i see all engine messages (yet in a bit different name)....

so , how come? did the principle fail? Or did something else make it like this?

I like the approach of having an entity list, and seperated player list. I also like the idea of updating the entity list with the loop , so you have a most independant way of doing so. But then i get fuzzed. I am trying to get a clear picture to make a bare minimum template.

So far, my code can compile, and it can run (does not crash). It still shows my welcome message even, but a lot of garbage is in the code that can be taken out.

As i see it now, there is in general :

the bot brain
the information for the bot brain
the interface

the bot brain is empty , the information for the bot brain(the updating cycle, entity list etc) is also empty, the interface works basicly.

I want to deliver my 'template' with an 'empty' interface so you know what basics have to be in to get it working. Its a shame i don't know a thing about Quake 3 or something, because else i could try 2 different 'interface.cpp' files and try to run the same code with it... thats the true way of showing it works.

[MarD]

Heyyo,

Well Stef, adding plugins shouldn't be too hard. If someone was able to leak the CZbot onto CSS I'm sure it won't be too long until others learn how he did it or find another way.

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

I don't quite understand the question you're asking... can you be more precise ?

As for the metamod "problem", refer to my previous post. Metamod or no metamod is not part of the problem, since all is needed for this framework to be usable is a hook on the video frame and a few engine functions. No matter the way, metamod or hook DLL (or anything else), if these parts are hookable, it WILL work. Here, metamod was used because it's a convenient way to hook the HL engine. You can consider metamod itself as "part" of the interface.

BTW, I got a mail telling that the United Admins might be interested in this as well.