A few more bot bugs

[Maleficus]

Originally Posted by the bindlestiff

Hey, Slick. The idea is to make Fritzbot better for all the world to use. That means finding discrepencies and fixing them. That's what a "beta" stage is all about.

We both are sensitive to small problems that occur during the action and want to do our bit to iron those out. We're not complaining or griping!

I haven't even been on the Net much the last 48 hours, until last night, because I've been busy preparing for school finals, and fighting the flu (still am too). So, you can imagine how seeing hour by hour updates about bugs could be preceived as being very frustrating for us, especially since we don't get paid for this, but do it for the love of the game and the community.

I'm still sick as hell, so will prolly come across more cross than I mean to be, but we need time to examine issues and bug reports. Most of us can only work on Fritz a few hours a week because of Real Life(tm). All of us here have full time jobs, school, and families to raise that come first before working on this mod.

We want Fritz to be the best it can be as well, but it will never be perfect, because none of us here is, but we will do our best.

Cheers!

[Denny]

Originally Posted by the bindlestiff

By "coding" I meant waypointing as well. Takes the same kind of talent and time!!

I guess i see where you're going by saying that, coding is more tedious and timeconsuming though, not only that things vary more in coding. Once you get the base waypointing skills down, they remain constant no matter what, coding is more variable. I think that makes sense, kind of...

Anyways i enjoy waypointing. In fact, i enjoy waypointing more than playing the game even. I find it fun getting the bots to work well on a map and fixing things so they work better, granted it has it's fair share of frustrations too. It gives a great feel of accomplishment when you finish though.

Market Garden is one of my favorites as well, i use to spend hours playing on big pub servers on that map and it was great fun. I kind of tried to mimic the bots to play it same or similar but it didn't work out 100% atm, so i hope this update will better and finish the map.

[Maleficus]

Just found the cause for the invisible bug.

Setting up private client slots, and joing the server using the private client password somehow makes the bots not see you.

Thx for submitting your server cfg bindle, I was able to find this bug by looking thru it. A fix will be submitted tonight.

Cheers!

[the bindlestiff]

Originally Posted by Denny

Anyways i enjoy waypointing. In fact, i enjoy waypointing more than playing the game even. I find it fun getting the bots to work well on a map and fixing things so they work better, granted it has it's fair share of frustrations too. It gives a great feel of accomplishment when you finish though.

Oh god -- I can feel myself slipping down the pathway to learning waypointing because that's the kind of pleasure that I get too -- making a program work well, locating bugs and stamping them out, and receiving satisfaction from seeing my work being used. Gotta go now -- have to download the Waypointing Tutorial!

[Denny]

Originally Posted by Maleficus

I haven't even been on the Net much the last 48 hours, until last night, because I've been busy preparing for school finals, and fighting the flu (still am too).

Most of us can only work on Fritz a few hours a week because of Real Life(tm). All of us here have full time jobs, school, and families to raise that come first before working on this mod.

We want Fritz to be the best it can be as well, but it will never be perfect, because none of us here is, but we will do our best.

Yuk, the flu, hope all goes well with that Mal, i hate getting the flu and it's only a matter of time before i get it as well. I don't care though, hey i'd rather have the seasonal flu than that avian flu that stuff sounds nasty.

I hate to say this as well but Mal is right. Fritzbot is great to work for and i'd love to work on it all the time (even if i wasn't being paid), but unfortunately school and my girlfriend and such come first and they take up alot of time.

I also want Fritz to be the best as well, in fact i've played many retail bots and i say Fritz beats them hands down even with the little quirks it'll never be perfect of course but if it's close enough, that's fine by me.

We don't want you to get the impression that we don't want bug reports or anything so we hope you don't take all this the wrong way. We always welcome bug reports and such, but try not to focus too much on the small bugs rather than the big one's (like the invisibility bug is a big one) Waypointing bugs are always welcome though, big or small.

Originally Posted by the bindlestiff

Oh god -- I can feel myself slipping down the pathway to learning waypointing because that's the kind of pleasure that I get too -- making a program work well, locating bugs and stamping them out, and receiving satisfaction from seeing my work being used. Gotta go now -- have to download the Waypointing Tutorial!

Hell yeah, by all means do so if you want. I always support people wanting to learn how to waypoint. Be sure to keep up with the wiki and threads just so you know who's all doing what waypoints and such.

[the bindlestiff]

Mal, you are terrific!!!!

While sick with the flu, preparing for winter finals, you took time to look at my problem and ferret out the culprit.

I'll be on the watch for your fix.

On behalf of all of us players who use Frtizbot, I want to enthusiastically thank you and your helpers for all the time and effort that you've put into this "labor of love." Like all of us (well, most, anyway), we have other lives - work, family, etc. and well understand that you have limited time to put into this.

We'll try not to be so "nit-picky" about the details and just report the major "play-damaging" bugs that we encounter.

[Maleficus]

OK, I checked, this looks like an engine bug.

For whatever reason, if you have the sv_privatepassword set on the server, and the client that connects has this password too, the engine overrides the game and declares that clients entity slot as not being in use.

Thats why the bots didn't see you: for both speed and safety reasons, I check first to see if you even exist (by occupying a entity slot) before I have the bots test if they can "see" you.

This safety check is needed, because if you suddenly disconnected, you could crash the game.

I can't fix the engine bug, because it's source isn't avaiable, but I could hack/hardcode it so that private clients didn't work anymore, which is ugly.


Either way, in the mean time, I suggest you take out private clients/password from your config, and just use g_password if you want to run a private server.

I'll play with it more tonight to see if I find a better solution.


Denny: I think this is going to need a wiki entry.

Cheers!

[Maleficus]

BTW: checking some of your other bug reports, and playing ingame, it would appear that a lot of the "visibility" based bugs you reported would be caused by this privateclient/password issue, since there are a lot of places in the code that do basic safety checks based on your entity slot. Also possibly your
crash problem.

Try it with it off, and let me know if you notice any of these issues as much anymore. Also, try it with bot_skill set to 2 or 3, since skill one is supposed to suck!

[Denny]

Originally Posted by Maleficus

Denny: I think this is going to need a wiki entry.

Cheers!

I think so too, because if it can't be fixed it needs to be documented. I think i'm gonna make a whole section for these kinds of things, that way thier more noticable when reading the Wiki. I'll wait and see if you come up with something new on this just in case.

[the bindlestiff]

I'm in the midst of checking this out now. The private client password "sv_privatePassword" has never worked and thef0x and I have been logging in with the normal "g_password."

I have just edited my server.cfg to delete the private password seta and also to disable the g_needpass requirement. But the server insists that I enter the "pennycreek" password to join the game. Somehow the rental server has set this in concrete somewhere. So at present I'm unable to test it without a password.

I'm going to try some more to get rid of the private password thingy . . . will let ya know.

Thanks for your help so far.