Waypointing

[hiyahin]

Hi. Like all people new to a forum, I'll praise your effort put into this bot. Afterall, I've heard of 1 or 2 bots that had problems like attacking their own scientists, attacking you when you have the scientists. Although I haven't tried this bot yet, I like the look and features that your bot has.

Anyway, just a question or two:
1. Wouldn't waypointing your bot be like waypointing all other HPB-based bots?
2. Would you release a bot that's metamod compatible?
3. What are the "few major but unnecessary features" (if you don't mind sharing it)
4. Will the bots vote for a research?

Thanks in advance,
hiyahin

[Ghoul]

Hello.

1. Yes, but the waypoints are a little more advanced. Along with having flags (such as item waypoint, or weapon waypoint), they also have item names associated with them, such as item_healthkit, weapon_shotgun. This helps the bots locate waypoints with specific items they need better. Grave Bot, in fact, is able to import old HPB Bot waypoints. If they're waypointed well, you just have to run "waypoint update" in the console to associate waypoints with their nearby items, then "waypoint save" to save the new data.

2. Eventually. I've never used metamod, so I'm not sure what goes into making a bot meta mod enabled. That's one of the reasons why I released the source, so if someone wants to, they can port it themselves. If I find some free time soon, I'll look into it.

3. While I've always loved HPB Bot, when it comes to actual game play.. the bot just isn't that good. It's never aware of what weapons it needs and doesn't need, or whether it should get more ammo for weapon X, etc. In combat, it simply charges enemies and tries to crowbar them.

Grave Bot is not like that. The bots do keep track of what weapons they have, how much ammo they have, and intelligently seek out weapons they don't have. If you put a bot in a level and let it roam around undisturbed, it will eventually collect every weapon it can (they need to be waypointed), and max out all ammo, along with maxing out health and armor. It doesn't do it by chance either, because it actually knows what to do.

As far as combat goes, they won't necessarily engage an enemy unless they believe it's possible for them to win. This depends on their weapon, armor, and health, and the enemies weapon, armor, and health. If they do decide to 'engage' an enemy, they will track that enemy down via waypoints even if that enemy goes out of site. In close combat, the bots will circle strafe, rather then just run up and crowbar, and if they have the long jump they'll use it to jump around and confuse their enemy.

4. For S&I, there are many features I wasn't able to complete, or rather didn't want to just yet due to time constraints. Bot voting was one of them. I plan to create a dyanmic system which weighs all the technology different amounts depending on the situation of the team. If the team is winning, they'll probably want more defensive techs (more armor). If the team is loosing, they'll want offensive techs (more speed). Getting the bots to vote isn't too difficult (just a matter of them sending a command to the server), it's getting them to vote for the correct technology.

[hiyahin]

Back from a game of S&I with GraveBot. Apparently, my friend was hosting a listenserver (non-steam) via LAN, and the game crashed twice in about 1h30mins. I freshly installed HL on both computers and the only modification I made to the mod was just adding the bots. There were a total of 22 bots + 2 players. It seemed to crash during intense combat. I haven't tried playing with less bots yet, so I'll keep you updated to see what happens.

(RE: Answer 3: So you mean you haven't implented that yet? I read something about that on your bot guide, so I assumed you added it in already. )

[Ghoul]

I've been having issues with S&I. Sometimes the bot will run fine for long periods of time, hours on end. I haven't been able to pinpoint an exact source of the crashes, I'm not even sure if it is Grave Bot or not (though it most likely is, but do note I never tested non-Steam S&I). Two crashes in an hour and a half isn't that bad, considering all of the chaos constantly going on. This makes tracking problems down extremely difficult. Tomorrow I'll run a long lasting listen server to see if I can track down any problems with MSVC++'s debugger.

Between HLDM and S&I, S&I is by far the lesser tested of the two. I'll continue testing though I'm not sure how heavily. School sucks. :-/

Everything I said in 3 is implemented.

Today I was able to get the metamod version of HPB bot to compile, so getting a meta mod version of Grave Bot should be pretty simple. Though I'm not sure how long it will take me, due to time constraints.

I'm interested in knowing how the bot performed, as far as getting scientists, defending dropped scientist, stuff like that. I've never been a big S&I player, so their AI most likely isn't nearly as good as it good be.

Thanks for your interest in Grave Bot.

[hiyahin]

Sounds good, but take your time. BTW, if you have a scientist, the bots will sometimes follow you and guard you. When in combat and you die, the bot guarding you usually gets the scientist by accident anyway.

Also, I haven't really noticed they defend the scientist on purpose, since usually the defending bot delays or kills the attacking bot and the scientist returns back to his spot.

Oh yeah, can you program it so that the bot is given a random personality and/or a random order of importance and will vote according to its personality? eg. Bot A: defensive, speed, aggressive, money
Bot B: money, speed, defensive, aggressive
It seems like I'm giving you a lot to do. Take your time. 9_9

Edit: I found out that the bots will shoot the flies that come out of that alien weapon instead of the person with the alien weapon in HLDM

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

all that looks pretty good for a beta 0.1 anyway !

[hiyahin]

Just a quick update about the crash bug. It doesn't seem to be anything about the number of bots, the intensity of the fights or the time. I don't know what's wrong, so I'll just do a few spyware/virus checks on the computer.

Edit: I'm starting to wonder if it's because the spawn points in overtime were too clumped and had too many bots in there. I don't know how to waypoint/edit waypoints, so I can't test to see whether have less waypoints in the spawn points would be effective.

Edit2: Ahh... stupid me. I should have checked more forums before posting things.

Originally Posted by Mr. Bonzo

Install SI normally, by pointing the installer to your Half-Life (WON) folder.

Then delete the file "[Half-Life]\si\settings.scr".

I haven't got time to see whether I can get through a round first. I'll update again when I've tried it.

Edit3: Meh, I've renamed the file, but the game still crashes. Something's wrong

[Ghoul]

Yeah, I did some tests earlier today and there are definately a few issues. Tracking them down, however, will be a problem.

At some point or another, the code is hitting an infinite loop. I'm not sure where though. I also experienced a problem where Science and Industry crashed (not Grave Bot, since the dll which crashed was si.dll, however Grave Bot most likely caused it) for some reason after I added and kicked some bots, not sure what's going on there.

Stay tuned for more updates!

[hiyahin]

So your guesses are that Grave Bot causes si.dll to have an infinite loop. Hmm... seems like I can't help you there. As far as I know, it doesn't have a pattern when si decides to crash. Sometimes I get really far into the game, sometimes I've just played for 4 mins or so; sometimes there's heavy gunfights, somtimes there was peace everywhere. And I don't see how adding and kicking bots would cause an infinite loop, unless the kicked bots are still loading something.

[Ghoul]

No no, the si.dll crash was an actual crash. An access violation, according to MSVC++. So, si.dll had the problem, but it was most likely caused by something Grave Bot did. I was adding and kicking bots at the time, messing with settings, so I may have fugled something.

The infinite loop issue is something else entirely, and seems to happen randomly during game play. I still have no idea what is causing it, but once I have more free time, I'll try to figure it out (exam week at school :-/).