Starting development of bot
 

Hi, I'm a Spanish computer science student who has chosen to make a bot as his final project.

I've never done any game modding before, but my objective is to implement some AI algorithms on the bot so that it acts reasonably humanlike. My project director would also like to see some kind of cooperative strategies from the bots.

The first thing I have to decide is the game. I've been mainly looking into botman's HPB Half-Life 1 bot, but I've seen in this forum that there's some progress in Half-Life 2 bots. Half-Life 2 would obviously be much more impressive, but is it feasible? Are there enough examples for a newbie like me to get something done?

In case it's not feasible and I used Half-Life 1, I had considered basing my bot on botman's HPB template. Is this a good starting point? Do you recommend any tutorials/articles considering I basically know nothing on bot programming?

Any comments will be greatly appreciated. Many thanks.

Re: Starting development of bot
 

although i am not into the HL2 scene that much as i was in the HL1 scene. I do know HL1 gives you a LOT of power to control things. There is also a LOT of information about it and its easy to code for. So in short, the learning curve is lower, its easier. And since your project is about making the algorithms work, i would suggest you take this route instead of spending a lot of time HOW to CODE things...

if you want HL2, good luck. There is information about it. HL2 SDK has some documentation and so forth. But afaik the bot support is limited.

Re: Starting development of bot
 

welcome to BU ximio ! this place is certainly the best place to hang around if you want to start coding a bot.

For starters check out our wiki ! And feel free to contribute to it too if you find our articles helped you :)

Re: Starting development of bot
 

I've developed bot for Counter-Strike with "AI algorithms". I'm using multi-agent systems and bots cooperate and communicate. (they should)

I'm studying postgraduate for masters degree and it is my diploma thesis. You can read its abstract. Maybe it will help you. I also plan to translate whole thesis to english someday...

I'm going to defend it on Thursday :)

If you know nothing about bot programming, developing cooperative bot into HL will take about year :)
If you don't know C/C++, don't even start developing it and choose something else for your final project.