HL2DM bots...

[stefanhendriks]

I haven't plouged through the source yet. As long as bots can select a weapon, it will be 'enough' i think to make something useful? I mean, afaik it is possible to let bots join a team, walk around, look around (?). So all that is left is weapon management?

[MarD]

Heyyo,

Slavax has been working on the RCBot2 code, and he added some code like bots try to randomly switch weapons, and I believe you can hear them fail to select a proper weapon slot by the beeping too actually, lol.

http://rcbot.bots-united.com/forums/...topic=1041&hl=

I believe that's his latest work. Check around the sourcecode to see if you can see some of the stuff he's done.

But yeah, technically, you can still get the bot up and running just fine with any mod, it's just being able to make a very efficient bot that knows if their weapon's empty, or to switch to a better weapon and such is the current problem.

I've built, and revised my waypoints for the official HL2DM levels as well to help out and get things flowing a little better.. RCBot2 still kinda turns wide, so they get stuck at random times...

I know vALVE said for DODS they'd help the makers that made DOD1.3 bots to port their bots to source and such.. but I'm sure that's more of a hollow promise at this rate.... mainly since they've ignored any plea to help out the bot coders.

I'm also still kinda curious as on how Dr. Evil is doing with OmniBot, and his little memory hack work-around.. haven't heard any news on HL2DM, so I think he dropped it..

[stefanhendriks]

From what i see from the rcbot2 , is that the code does not look complete, perhaps on purpose. Neat code though.

Also, it looks like the bot selects a weapon by just its name. I have to look further into this to be sure what is going on. But from the looks of it, it looks nice.

I do not see anything that holds data of the bots weapons though; that is a pitty imo. (or i did not look enough, if anyone else is looking, please fill me in).

[DrEvil]

I'm not doing any memory hacking, and in fact specifically don't want to do any memory hacking. I've been trying to push valve into extending the SDK with the necessary changes. They are dragging their feet though as usual.

You can get a basic bot working rather easily, as I did with Omni-bot. I didn't feel it fit to release at the time though, given the limitations of the bot sdk. Essentially the only way to get them to use different weapons is to give them the weapon yourself, which is essentially cheating. That in itself isn't a disaster so much as the fact that giving them a weapon creates a new weapon every time you call it, causing you to run out of entities if you get them switching weapons too often. On top of that there's no access to ammo information, so you they don't know when they are out of ammo and stuff. It's just an all around half-assed bot interface that they seem to want to avoid extending and won't accept my requests to do it for them.

It was playable to some degree. It spawned with a random weapon and runs around and would shoot at you.

[stefanhendriks]

Probably because mod makers are more 'important' than bot makers; Valve will not set a bigger priority concerning the issues around bot creation (for plugins).

In other words, they don't give a damn.

[MarD]

Heyyo,

Sad reality yes... I remember one vALVE employee said he was going to look into it like, a year ago, and never said anything again..... I think we should all just spam Gabe Newell's Email addy.. I think from the Lost Coast commentary he said it was gaben@valve.com .... what do you say guys? we should keep trying, cause I doupt valve's going to be rebuilding a whole new engine anytime soon and just keep upgrading the SourceEngine as they did with the Source2 Engine.

[stefanhendriks]

Yeah, that could be a sollution.

[DrEvil]

I wish more people would keep bugging valve on the mailing list. I regularly bug the Mike Durand guy, and have asked if they would let me do it and give the code to them but I have yet to get an answer to that.

[stefanhendriks]

I was signed up at the valve mailing list, but i got so flooded, i signed myself out. Perhaps not a wise thing to do, but times change and so do interests in bot development.

First i'd have to get all stuff compiling again, need to install Visual Studio 2003 again, only got VC6 and VC2005 express. The later one requires me to download stuff, which i already have in VC2003.

Anyhow, i do encourage to get this going, but i can't participate fully, so i will not pretend to solve this problem myself. ;-)

[Black_Hunter]

whats abaut sourcemm, the dev team can code some functions for bots or not? talk to the sourcemm team...

SourceMM:
http://www.sourcemm.net/

Forum:
http://forums.alliedmods.net/forumdisplay.php?f=56