United Bot philosophy and roadmap

[Lazy]

I'm learning UnrealScript right now, UT 2003 is installed and I am working as fast as I can with the time I have.

Just wanted to share some ideas I've had. The last bit of work on the design of foxbot I did (uhg...I may actually code something _eventually_) I made specifically to be mod independant.....as a side note (appart from the halflife calls) I noticed it could be game independant too....if hooks to the engine could be found.

The basic premice was that it used a blackboard architecture.....a shared memory pool where modules (such as, Can I see an enemy...or Navigation) could post and retrieve information...so all the bits of code where independant of each other.
Given raw entity data posted in the memory pool.....the module that checks visibility would notice it (on its next cycle) and then test to see what was visible to a bot....
it would then post the results.....so the memory pool now contains entities....and what bot can see them.
You can have modules that attach information to them such as....is it hostile...is it shooting..etc etc...
New modules, or changes to module designs won't effect other modules.....unless they change the data thats posted.

Time slicing can be applied if needed....as data is retreived and left on the pool as needed.


After reading over what you've said I scetched out an idea....assuming its possible....the wrapper dll could have plugins too....the wrapper would provide standard calls to and from the bot.....
plugins for this would provide the code needed to hook to specific game engines....so the wrapper need not change, just the hooking....
As some games won't provide all the data needed...plugins can simulate it for some games too.

Not sure what you all think of the two ideas...just my take on it all.
I like things to be easily expandable.

[Maleficus]

Originally Posted by botman

I was going to investigate how much was possible with Quake III as far as replacing the bot code with your own code....... but I do remember that all Quake II MODs had to be written in Quake C...... I know that with Quake III, DLL file support was added, but I'm not sure if MOD makers would create their own DLLs or if they were still limited to Quake C for their MOD source code.

Only QuakeI used QuakeC. QuakeII and QuakeIII were plain C and used .dlls (Quake III could also use .qvm which was an opcode based virtual machine that was still coded in C, but was safer than running a .dll).

Its really easy to replace the Q3 bot AI with your own - I already wrote a framework that did this in Q3, which I later converted for RtCW, which became the Fritz Bot.

Since RtCW is based on the Q3 engine, it was really easy to do.

The only active q3 bot I know of is the Art of War bot for Q3 - its quite good: http://www.planetquake.com/artofwar
It isn't a "from scratch" bot tho, they just improved the Q3 bot AI. They were supposed to release source for it, but they never did.


They have been other custom bots (Clockbot, TangetBot, Battlebots, etc), but they all died. Having an official bot in the game really put a damper on the communities willingness to try out a new bot. And most people just didn't care. :'(


PMB: if your looking for another engine, Q3 (or perhaps Doom3) would be a really good choice! I myself am really looking at Doom3. The game itself will probably be pretty flat, but knowing id software, it will be VERY moddable and the possibilities will be limitless! And theres going to be a whole new generation of games based on it once its released (now that Q3 is getting long in the tooth).

I can't promise I can help out with the design itself, but I can be a source of info for the Quake series of games, and their offshoots, and probably Doom3 (which will use C++) too when it comes out (I've been programming/modding id games since Quake1).

[RedLink]

Hmm, I think BF1942 uses a script language just like Unreal. I`m actually working on my own game language named "PCoSL" mainly used as a script for my own game engine "Project: Fuji". I have put a lot of effort in making it universal and easy to convert/adapt, so it might be of some use.

BUT to make a universal A.I bot script would probably be something really useful but as botman mentioned start small and then grow big . Just to be able to make a bot spawn in 2 totally different games is a really big step in the right direction.

I rather think that you should but a lot of effort in adding support for game engines like Unreal, HL/HL2, Quake3 and BF(2?). Simply because these are the engines that continue to grow even after the game it self has died.

Anyway, If you guys ever need some help don`t hesitate to semd me a msg @ redlink@redlink-studios.com