Hello again everyone.
I've posted before about my bot framework Omni-bot and since then I've still been hard at work on the project.
The old thread can be seen
here for those that don't remember.
Anyways, since my last post there have been significant progress, most of which can be read about
here in the development section of the homepage.
In the next few days the linux version of Omni-bot will be released along with the ETF 1.4 update, also the ET version will be released, freshly built on the new ET 2.6 SDK. The interface layer for Half-life 1 is coming along decently, so soon the number of potentially supported mods will increase significantly.
To coincide with a working HL1 interface, in the coming week or so I will be putting together and releasing an Omni-bot SDK, which will allow users to add bots to mods. It should be significantly easier(and definately faster) to get bots up and running in a mod using the framework.
The SDK will contain all the available game interfaces(ET, HL1, and HL2 as soon as we figure out the weapon problems with bots). The ET interface should be easily adaptable to Q3 and RTCW, considering their code is likely very similar. Additionally I will probably expose all the source code to the ETF bot as an example of how the framework is used.
Basically all implementations of Omni-bot will share the features of a central omnibot.dll, which contains all the common code that the author shouldn't have to worry too much about. It houses the path planner(currently waypoint based, abstracted to be extendable to nav mesh or some other variation in the future), the scripting support, the archive support, integrated downloader, the weapon/item/goal system/sensory/targeting/steering systems, and some other stuff.
The user will primarily be responsible for deriving their own version of a Client class for the mod they are implementing, such as CS_Client, and their own version of an IGame class, and optionally deriving from an IPlayerClass if the mod has different player classes they would like to implement differently. Most of the implementation of the bot are done in the mods bot dll, with an occasional visit to the interface in order to implement custom messages to get data from the game.
My plan is to continue developing the framework, and work it into an even more powerful and feature rich foundation for FPS bot work in games that support them. As I develop the framework with optimizations or new features, every supported mod will have them available to them.
Anyways, I'm curious whether any bot developers around here would be interested in checking out and giving feedback on an early version of the sdk before it is released. I'm guessing this might be available ready to check out sometime in the next week and a half or so.
Thanks