United Bot philosophy and roadmap

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

argh. in yer face.

* How much does it cost to buy even the smallest of the licenses from Unreal ? (utopia!... 9_9)
* When Unreal updates/changes the engine, what is their policy regarding their licensees ?

<walking in circles>

If we drop Unreal (with lotsa regrets, since botman would have been a weighted asset while working with this engine), what is possible with Battlefield 1942 for example ?
We need support of at least 2 game engines besides HL, in my opinion.

[Rick]

Uhm both medal of honor allied assault and serious sam have open source bots. Though I know for sure that the bot for serious sam is a 'bot-mod' and I think its written in a C variant, in case this matters.

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

MoH:AA uses a Quake-like engine so IMO it's no surprise it supports 3rd party bots.

I'm currently scouring the net for info about the BF1942 engine. It's a proprietary engine called "Refractor 2" and there's no official SDK although Dice says they are working on "modding tools". I don't know if modders have the same amount of control on the engine than with the Quake series. It looks like Desert Crisis (?) is a total conversion MOD for BF1942 but I don't know the amount of coding involved.

I hope the Unreal track is not definitely closed yet.

[@$3.1415rin]

does anybody know anything about modding capabilities of farcry e.g. ?

[stefanhendriks]

farcy has mod compatibility. I did not take a look into it yet, but it seems promising.

Btw, i do not know if i have to 'apply' for this project? i saw at the wiki page i am not listed yet. Ofcourse i am 100% interested and it would be nice to contribute. I don't know what i can do, except typing long messages with no/less meaning?

[Terran]

Than add yourself to the wiki - that's how this nice tool works

[Onno Kreuzinger]

jep, your email account (user/pass) is reserved for you, else any username can be choosen, ist free and open, a wiki.

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

Guys, I need an update on your committment to this.

=> What do we decide regarding the Unreal engine ?
* drop it ?
* use a network socket library to do inter-process communication like the GameBots at planetunreal ?

Other questions will follow but this one oughta be answered first. Answers like "it will be very difficult to do this or that" or "we can do that but it will be tricky" are of no use for anybody. We can tergiverse for ages without taking a decision. DO WE work with the Unreal engine or not ?

Personally I think it's worth a try. The Unreal GameBots are a proof that the concept is working. Even if it's not the acme of usability, we'll have a (primitive) UbGameDriver more in our list, and this is the most important.

I need your point of view.

[Terran]

If it's doable, let's do it. At least we know that it can be done using the network layer "trick", therefore we have a start.

But I don't know enough about bots to evaluate if the GameBots API provides enough information and functions for our goals. But at least we could spawn a bot - our first goal.

[stefanhendriks]

I agree with terran, lets do it.