United Bot for HL2?

[DrEvil]

What matters to me personally is writing a bot for HL2. If I can work with like minded bot developers on a united bot to support all the halflife2 mods, then I say lets do it but IMO trying to basically hack other games into letting you run some complex AI routines is both not worth my time, and really not going to get you much in the long run, though if someone wants to do that then more power to them.

[stefanhendriks]

I'd say, just write this HL 2 'game driver' (and a HL 1 game driver should also be 'not too hard') to proove this concept works. Once the concept works, writing a game driver for game Z should also work because the bot driver runs on the same functions anyway, its just how the game driver gives them form/input.

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

Okay. All I wanted to know was whether everybody's opinion was mature enough, because it's quite a switch. Not that I doubted of it, but seeing good points in a suggestion does not mean agreeing with it, and I wanted to know whether you were actually strongly agreeing or not and why.

Okay. I agree too.
Let's make it portable, in this case.

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

I have added a poll to this thread to hear the voice of those who haven't expressed themselves yet. The poll will close next monday. From there on, we'll be able to begin serious talkings

HL2 will be coming fast. Things to do:
- reassign the responsibilities
- appoint one or two leaders
- write down all the APIs and agree on as much concepts as possible (discussions ought to be settled FAST!)
- code

[@$3.1415rin]

maybe we should stick to the game driver architecture, but only develop a HL2 driver for now ... otherwise I fear that porting will then be very much work later on.

[Austin]

CS has kept me busy for 2.5 years, HL2/CS has the potential to keep me busy for a long time. I don't have much free time. Focusing on one platform that we all have a lot of experience on is appealing.

Hey, perhaps with HL2 and a good group of dedicated people, we could get botman involved with bot coding again!

[Huntkillaz]

/random nooby coder thought

i was thinking that if u guy's make it so that the bot's basic stuff like movement, personalities, enemy\world\object detection is coded and kept totally seperate from the game engine\PLAY\style

ie..game files work like plugins

then u wouldn't have to do so much work\code for each game

it'll be harder i guess but better in the end since u'll be able to plugin almost any game

(kinda like how metamod plugs in stuff,so metamod is the basics of the bot)

i'm guessin thats whats meant by the game driver archeitecture

[FrostyCoolSlug]

i see botmans point here, its going to be _VERY_ difficult to support other games, the HL bot code was obviously difficult to make initially, but i'm sure the HL SDK made this much easier, other games dont have SDKs etc, and conciquently, dont have the same possible bot support. Also, with the complexity of a lot of the games, the main engine will be pretty much empty (except with some common variables, isalive() etc) and the entire game support will be in one DLL, but would probably be easier making seperate bots for each game.

When it comes to HL2, if we follow this 'path' i think we should create a bot for (literally) every mod avaliable, theoretically, its possible, and i'm sure that mod coders will assist us in any way they can.. or maybe make the SMALL / XML systems avaliable, so mod developers can code their own parts of the bots

Would certainly proove interesting to see what comes out

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

Originally Posted by @$3.1415rin

maybe we should stick to the game driver architecture, but only develop a HL2 driver for now ...

I would tend to agree with that. What do you think ?

[Killaruna]

Sure, that's the natural way to start. You won't be developping drivers for multiple games at once, never ever. Proof of concept works best for one example.