Future plans

[TomTom]

With the drop off in ET mapping activity and the release of omnibot 0.7 I suppose it is worth discussing the future of Fritzbot.

Crapshoot is working to port/adapt omnibot 0.7 to a RTCW version. Mal is still working hard in the real world. Even Pav (Bobots) too seems to have greatly slowed his development work. 420Blunt and the bindlestiff are, I assume, involved in real things, and myself I have real things I need to focus on too.

Nonetheless I still want to finish the wiki and release a few maps that are in WIP (but some will remain WIP/beta forever). Ultimately while Mal is on other things, the end goal of FritzBot ET would be a single all-in-one file of released waypoints, tools, complete wiki and mod runtime.

We should all thank bots-united for allowing this forum to continue these past 2 years and I hope they will allow it to continue here and in the archives. BTW Ancient has offered to host our waypoint files at CFEGames something we may consider when we have a single file all-in-one version.

P.S. If anyone expresses interest I could post a first WIP of Adlerhorst for this weekend.

[TomTom]

BTW I finally posted that first WIP of Adlerhorst_final. The Axis owns it near the ruins and entrance so I am not sure it will be worth doing much more work on it unless better team balance is possible.

[nedd3h]

Good work and a big Thank You to all involved in this mod

I'll always continue to host the FritzBot mod plus more on my site.

[enigma1]

Perhaps the positive thing about omnibot is that the interface is included with the etpub version of et. etpub is quite popular and various servers have it. Still the module is closed source as I understand and has its own problems. In my opinion Fritzbot is still better in terms of playability. The unfortunate part is that it's also closed source and is bundled with an old version of etpro.

I checked the source code of the latest etpub I could find. Perhaps if some of us still have interest on et we could somehow setup a team and do our own bot module that could be compatible with the existing nav and script files of fritzbot. It's not an easy task as programming will be involved but the end result will be to have an open source module that we could enjoy with et. Even if our free time is limited we could still try. If you know of better alternatives please share your thoughts.

[TomTom]

Well the question to my mind is would the bots still have the best qualities of FritzBots. To my mind their better qualities are;
(1) They are less taxing on the CPU than Bobots, Omnibots or EastFront NPCs. You can run a good number of them on a old PIII.
(2) The Cvop behaviour is decent enough (though Mal's cvops work in ETQW is much better)
(3) The map aiscript botsight setting allows for a more realistic feel than bot mods that use a global or fixed value. Bot skills are not overpowering (nobody likes bots that pwn you).
(4) The waypointing editor can be run while play testing, and basic waypointing is easy enough to do after an evening of learning curve.

Really I have had no plans on doing modding. Mapping or modelling I have thought about doing but not starting a mod.
So I doubt I could put much time to such a project, but getting the WET source to compile in Gcc and MS VC++ and merging in Chrukers "project fix" might not be too much time off hand (though I'll need a newer linux box ). The open source concept in an active bot project would be novel enough (BTW DrEvil of Omnibot has posted the source of his foxbot project).

[TomTom]

OK found the etpub patch file 0.8.1 and it apparently already has Chruker's project fix included. I wonder if foxbot could be merged for a simple test compile... No time for at least a few weeks...

[CrapShoot]

Having spent considerable time working for both omnibot and fritzbot, I'll add my two cents. Firstly, comparing the two is a bit unfair since Fritzbot was made for ET, while omnibot is a bot framework that can be used for any game that has a 'friendly' SDK.. I understand that to an ET end user this is irrelevant, but it may have some relevance to people interested in expanding on the feature set of the bot specific to one game.

One of the big differences between the two bots for ET I think is the quality of waypoints and map scripts. The Fritzbot waypointing team (TomTom, the BindleStiff, 420Blunt, and myself) did a great job of packaging up completed waypoints that were passed around for testing, critique, etc before TomTom or the BindleStiff packaged them up for a 'release'. This guaranteed a certain level of quality where as the omnibot approach of releasing beta quality and below waypoints significantly impacted many first time users impressions of the bot.

Omnibot isn't open source, but DrEvil was very open to granting me access to the code for adding rtcw support. It sounds to me like some of you are at the point where I was with rtcw fritzbot; I had nothing against rtcw fritzbots, but wanted to see some more features in an rtcw bot. It may be something to look at if any of you are seriously considering building a bot from the ground up; especially at this stage of ET's lifecycle. You may even be a bit surprised at the current scripting capabilities in which you can basically define bot behaviors, create custom goals, etc.

For clarity about a few things, i'll respond to some of TomTom's comments.

Originally Posted by TomTom

Well the question to my mind is would the bots still have the best qualities of FritzBots. To my mind their better qualities are;
(1) They are less taxing on the CPU than Bobots, Omnibots or EastFront NPCs. You can run a good number of them on a old PIII.

Nothing to debate here. Maleficus was extremely careful with resources. Although some limitations were a bit restricting (32 max bots, 4 max connections per node, etc), at the end of the day it's a great functioning bot with minimal hardware requirements.

Originally Posted by TomTom

(2) The Cvop behaviour is decent enough (though Mal's cvops work in ETQW is much better)

This is an example of something that could be completely done in script with omnibot.

Originally Posted by TomTom

(3) The map aiscript botsight setting allows for a more realistic feel than bot mods that use a global or fixed value. Bot skills are not overpowering (nobody likes bots that pwn you).

This isn't unique to Fritzbot. Omnibot also has the ability to change sight distance in a map script.

Originally Posted by TomTom

(4) The waypointing editor can be run while play testing, and basic waypointing is easy enough to do after an evening of learning curve.

Can be done with omnibots as well.

Originally Posted by TomTom

Really I have had no plans on doing modding. Mapping or modelling I have thought about doing but not starting a mod.
So I doubt I could put much time to such a project, but getting the WET source to compile in Gcc and MS VC++ and merging in Chrukers "project fix" might not be too much time off hand (though I'll need a newer linux box ).

Pretty easy to do really. The sdk has projects for windows and build scripts for linux (and i think mac). It would just be a matter of applying the patch. If this is really something that you guys are going to pursue, I think I still have the code snippets I sent Mal for adding ETPro scripting support.

Originally Posted by TomTom

The open source concept in an active bot project would be novel enough (BTW DrEvil of Omnibot has posted the source of his foxbot project).

foxbot is a team fortress classic bot and i believe that is really old code.

To be clear, the point of my post isn't to say one bot is better or worse than the other. I've invested time in both and it would be silly for me to say anything bad about either . I just think that if you are seriously considering creating a brand new bot for ET, you may want to consider talking with DrEvil first to get an idea of the frameworks capabilities (or even access to the code).