JoeBOT XP - progress and paper ( beta )

[@$3.1415rin]

For all those who havnt seen this pages yet :

JoeBOT XP documentation ( beta stage ) : http://www.lampel.net/johannes/joebotxp/JoeBOTXPDoc-beta.pdf

Progress page of JoeBOT XP : http://joebot.bots-united.com/screenshots.html

I hope I'll can fight off some hours of sleep and continue during the next months currently thinking about how to dedicate tasks to squads on team level, that's easier to explain in words and actually to code - taking care of the general structure and reusing code of course ...

[@$3.1415rin]

May 25th, 2005
Found again little time to work on JoeBOT XP. I finally fixed a weird bug in the squad system. So the basic squad behaviours are already working, i.e. they try to avoid to run all the exact same paths within one squad, so that they hopefully won't come around a corner in one line providing the perfect target for an evil human being exploiting bot behaviour using a sniper rifle ;-) They also have a basic cohesion behaviour which results in a squad where the first might wait for his fellow teammembers, also taking a look at the current weapons, so that a bot with a sniper weapon running in front of the squad is less probable than a squad member running there with a shotgun.
The bots themselves have quite little navigational intelligence. This has all been moved to the squad level. And that's exactly the problem I'm currently working on : The squads should fulfill certain tasks, also depending on the type of the map. I'm currently evaluating a blackboard architecture on team level, that means, there would be a 'blackboard' on team level containing possible tasks. Once a squad sees a suitable task there, it might take it from the board and execute it - while other squads shouldn't be able to execute it any more. The decision if a task is suitable should be done on the basis of the availability of certain types of weapons, items and time. For example the squad with a bot carrying the bomb should start going to a bomb spot, maybe some 10 seconds after the beginning of a round. Currently the squads have a random navigation behaviour, which commands the squadmembers to go to random locations on the map together. Interestingly this produces a pretty intelligent looking behaviour of the squad, although you won't yet find a Counter-Terrorist squad defending a bomb spot, yet.

Enough said, you can watch a little demo video of the squad behaviour here ( ~10MB ) . The white lines connect the bots inside one team.

Note: right click on the link for the video and then select 'save target as' to download the video. simple left clicking might cause problems, no idea why.

/@$3.1415rin

[stefanhendriks]

quite fun to see CS 1.6 bots are still being worked on

EDIT:
cool to see how they navigate as a group. Although sometimes i have th efeeling they simply hunt each others location and have one leader what lets them go through the map (sort of hostage navigation, but more wide spread).

Sometimes you do see some very cool stuff, when they take several positions in an area, i believe it was in the underpass. All in all quite impressed, and no nav-mesh! good job!

[@$3.1415rin]

havnt yet had the time to port it to CS:S, therefore still cs1.6. but the structure of that won't change anyway :-)

they don't exactly hunt each other, a squad behaviour determines a goal, and then sequential pathfinding is started, adding costs to already 'wanna be used' paths by other squadmembers to avoid getting stuck and to randomize the paths. ( no running in a straight line just behind the others ). looks also great when they run somewhere where you can find obstacles likes crates, so they automatically go to a location from 2 sides.

btw, the fact that one bot is falling down to the underpass was more an error I think, and then he's stuck, somehow he doesnt recover. anyway, you can see the cohesion behaviour, i.e. that the other squadmembers are waiting. after some time the nav sys is reset, and since the squad level navigation is random at the moment ( because the blackboard system isnt working yet ), they go back.