Bots and "other" game engines

[botmeister]

I posted this thread asking which game engines other than HL allow 3rd party bots to be added as external mods.

http://forums.bots-united.com/showthread.php?t=987

I would like to know the following:

Do you guys think we should post a list of these game engines on our web site?

Do you think it is time to make an attempt to expand Bots United to include more game engines besides HL?

The idea of posting a webpage with the game engine list would be to have it "googlized" so people doing searches on their favorite bot and/or game engine may come across this site.

Perhaps, we should also consider adding "internal" bots as well to the list? These bots may or may not be commercial, and would include the upcomming CS Bot from Turtle Rock. What I think may make sense is a separate forum list of links entitled "Commercial Bots".

Any ideas, comments, suggestions (positive or negative) is appreciated.

There's a number of items here, so we should probably just bat around ideas in here, and in separate threads vote on each issue that makes good headway.

botmeister

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

I did not want to rush a reply because I believe the question you raised deserves a particular attention, botmeister ; you are pretty damn well right to raise it, actually it's high time.

I feel as concerned as you about the current image of Bots United and its representation among the different game engines : it is so far obvious that we're a Half-Life community only, and that the opening to other games/engines is currently, and will be in the future, difficult. This, IMO, for several reasons, but foremost one.

That first reason is that the BU founders all come from the same origin. We're more or less experienced HL coders, with little to do with the other games. We built Bots United together, and gathered our own communities in order to craft a larger one, that to which we are manifestly succeeding, but the point remains that both the coders that we are and the communities that we brought together are Half-Life (and especially Counter-Strike) fans. With the exception of the HPB_bot, which seems to have more a brilliant past than a future, all the bot forums featured here are Counter-Strike bots.

The effect of all this is that nearly all the discussions in all the forums are more or less centered on this game. Even the more abstract discussions on the developers forums make reference to Half-Life or Counter-Strike specific techniques. Even more, our reputation is starting to depict us as a Counter-Strike bot resource center. This is not what we initially wanted, but it also makes it very difficult to open up to other games and engines.

Does this mean we have to enforce a stronger policy of separation of the topics in each forum ? A better repartition of what is generic to AI and what is specific to a game ? Although applying this idea can lead to a better modularity as far as games and game engines are concerned I don't think it is desirable, for it is obvious that the Half-Life (or Counter-Strike) part of the forums will then inheritate of 95 percent of the posts, which will lead immediately to 95 percent of the traffic and the forum activity being centralized on it. As a result, we won't be able to avoid that the former extrapolates and the second one dies. People in the Half-Life/CS part of the forums will naturally start talking about generic AI stuff, which would have fit best in the general AI section, only because all the forum traffic is here and not there.

I believe it is urgent for the Council to raise some sort of a political campaign among diverse foreign bot makers, and that we take it very seriously. In order for our community to diversify we need to invite and include ASAP more than one foreign bot maker, and the subsequent condition is that these bots generate traffic. More than one, because inviting just one first will inevitably lead this experiment to a failure : the poor guy and his community will simply be lost and drowned among the HL/CS fans we are. I can't not imagine posts like "hey, I tried to install your bot with CS 1.6 but it won't work, plz help me" in the newcomer's forum. This makes me think that two foreign newcomers, or more, at once would be a non neglectable asset to guarantee the viability of this attempt. Never forget that these newcomers MUST generate traffic too, else they are doomed to failure from the start. If there is not a reasonably large and mature crew of followers for these new bots to generate activity and help auto-regulating the interest, these bot makers will not have any interest in joining Bots United : they simply won't feel at home !

This is a complicated topic, but it for sure deserves a great lot of attention. Our President, not the person but the institution he represents, has a first role to play here: it's about pushing the load in the right direction, i.e, transform the punctual interest that this thread is generating today in a planned project, and keeping pushing it forward to bring it to completion. A campaign, I was saying.

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

*BUMP*

reactions! please!

[@$3.1415rin]

i'll edit this post as soon as I had time to read the stuff above

[HangFire]

Just my opinion, I'd say its definently a good idea for BU to accommodate games other than Half-Life. Theres a number of good bots for games other than Half-Life, and making the site into a general computer game AI community would be great. Just organize the bots' private forums into "HL bots" and "Other bots" sub sections. If a game other than HL has a significant number of bots, then give it its own subsection for it and it's bots. The more diversity bots that can be gathered here, the better.

[Terran]

HangFire made a considerable suggestion. The title of this site is "bots united" which IMHO includes ALL bots for ALL games.

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

That is also the point of our mission statment, unite the game AI community under one roof and start exploring diverse fields of game programming.

It needs a serious development plan, though, and this is what I tried to express in my lenghty post above.

[Terran]

Maybe you should start by defining goals you want to reach this year.

[botmeister]

Originally Posted by Terran

Maybe you should start by defining goals you want to reach this year.

Get at least *one* bot author in here that's not HL related.

[HangFire]

Theres a few bots for RTCW and Soldier of Fortune 2 that I could suggest.