State of the Bot

[The_Hard_Mission_Guy]

Welcome back Gentlemen!
It seems obvious that after several bots united crew and counsil members have (at least temporally) left us , the next question that arises is that What happens/ed with the United Bot? Where did the development halt? etc....

I hope The project is not gonna drown like the Ronald Regan Star War Project...LOL

[The Storm]

The project is not active at the moment but you always can bring it to live. The Source codes of RealBot:Source, HPB2 and RCBOT2 are released.

[The_Hard_Mission_Guy]

Actually I would love to , but the HL2 engine is simply to powerful to be run on my average laptop .......so it would be hell to do any programming under the current technical conditions!
Maybe after I can get back to my Desktop computer (which is accelerated by a kick-ass VGA and waits for me on another continent) and if I manage to finish what I'm doing right now...then I'll see into HPB2 and RCBOT2

[KWo]

The problem with a bot for HL2 is - we don't have any info from Valve (as some SDK2) how to manage weapons for bots. That's the main reason nothing happens for the bot for HL2. I was talking with Bailopan (AMX X, Source-mod, metamod and few others project main developer) to give the info about weapons he got after hacking CSS data, but some people here were disagree (they want to have everything leggally from Valve - so they may wait forever). The story You can read here...
The last info from DrEvil gives some hope they finally do this SDK part for bots.

Originally Posted by The_Hard_Mission_Guy

Maybe after I can get back to my Desktop computer (which is accelerated by a kick-ass VGA and waits for me on another continent) (...)

Offtopic - just wondering - where are You from and where are You right now (I mean in both cases - the country)?

[The_Hard_Mission_Guy]

thanks for the info!
reading the article right now....

Originally Posted by KWo

Offtopic - just wondering - where are You from and where are You right now (I mean in both cases - the country)?

Previous Location : somewhere in Europe

Current Location : somewhere in Asia

[DrEvil]

KWo, we have yet to hear how this Bailopan fellow is getting weapon data. I for one am still interested in knowing how he is doing it, even if it is a hack. My understanding was that Metamod Source and similar work by hooking functions, and someone way back confirmed on the hl2 mailing list that I couldn't use MM source to get the info we desire. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though, so please, if your friend has figured it out tell him to post some info.

[KWo]

Originally Posted by The_Hard_Mission_Guy

Previous Location : somewhere in Europe
Current Location : somewhere in Asia

Why so confidental (I was meaning the country names)? You are afraid someone can catch You or what?

[BAILOPAN]

I am unsure as to what you're trying to do with weapons. If you give me a little detail I can help you.

(Note that I don't really hang out on these forums so I may not have fast replies)

[KWo]

Originally Posted by BAILOPAN

I am unsure as to what you're trying to do with weapons. If you give me a little detail I can help you.

(Note that I don't really hang out on these forums so I may not have fast replies)

The full list of all missing things is in the first post of this topic:
http://forums.bots-united.com/showthread.php?t=4026

[DrEvil]

What he said. The most important of such missing features is essentially:

What weapons does the bot have?
or more easily,
Does the bot have weapon x?

and a way to query the ammo from the bot.

With those 2 functions, which would have been trivial for valve to add to the interface long ago, we could make some pretty functional bots, though without the other things they would be a bit more stupid that most of us desire. At least they would be releasable and fun to play.

The only weapon function exposed in the bot interface SetActiveWeapon is the most poorly written function ever, creating a brand new weapon for the bot every time you call it. It doesn't take long to crash the game with this function, when it runs out of enemies.

void CPlayerInfo::SetActiveWeapon( const char *WeaponName ) 
{ 
    Assert( m_pParent );
    if ( m_pParent->IsBot() )
    {
        CBaseCombatWeapon *weap = m_pParent->Weapon_Create( WeaponName );
        if ( weap )
        {
            m_pParent->Weapon_Equip(weap); 
            m_pParent->Weapon_Switch(weap); 
        }
    }
}

Clearly whoever wrote this function had no idea what they were doing. This function should FAIL if the bot doesn't have it, or at the least a bool _force parameter to only create on request. We would still need another function bool HasWeapon(const char *WeaponName), to query if the bot has the weapon. Another trivial function. Fixing these 2 issues would have been a damn nice start, and taken someone at valve a whopping 10 seconds to do. I'm not bitter though