good tutorial for making a bot from scratch?

[ceriux]

based off the player model.

[Wazat]

I wonder if Coffee's site is still up. My understanding is Tutor Bot was a wonderful way to learn AI and bot building.

Someone may know of the link and/or have an archive.

[ceriux]

this should be his site right? http://minion.planetquake.gamespy.com/index2.html

or this?

http://minion.planetquake.gamespy.com/index3.html

[MauveBib]

Yes, the AI cafe is without a doubt the best site for this. It doesn't start from scratch, it starts with a simple template bot called the tutor bot then each tutorial adds a new feature to the bot. The tutorials are very well written and I (and many others) learnt an awful lot from them. I highly recommend them.

The link to the tutorial page seems to be broken in the site, so here's a direct link to the tutorials page:

http://minion.planetquake.gamespy.com/tutorial/main.htm

And here's a link to the tutor bot page for the download:

http://minion.planetquake.gamespy.com/tutor.htm

[ceriux]

i found those... iv applied the tutor bot to a vannilla quake mod directory, and the bot doesnt seem to spawn.

[MauveBib]

Did you read the instructions in tutor.qc? If you follow them correctly it will work.

[ceriux]

got it working, wasnt paying attention. my next problem seems that tutor bot completely changes some aspects of the game. such as i noticed i started getting random weapons on spawn . some that wernt even on the map. also the bots dont show up in the scoreboard o.O?

[Electro]

I'd highly recommend stripping the bot RIGHT back, get rid of all the player animation and think stuff in it.

Then implement proper botclient stuff that is supported by FTE and Darkplaces. This will allow the bots to use real player physics, and show them on the scoreboard. As well as keeping the amount of bs pollution in your qc to get things working to a minimum.

[MauveBib]

The tutor bot is initially rubbish, the downloaded version supports basically nothing, has fake weapon pickups, not on the scoreboard etc.

The idea is that you follow the tutorials and gradually add these features to the bot, learning in the process. The resulting bot is a lot better, though still not brilliant, but it teaches you an awful lot in the process.

If you want to make a DP only bot the tutor bot isn't a great place to start. I have a project called MauveBot that is roughly speaking a DP specific tutor bot equivilent; a plugin bot written to be as simple and short as possible. I wrote it for Nexuiz but it should work fine for Quake. I'll see if I can dig it up.

[ceriux]

awsome thanks.

[MauveBib]

Ok, here's the MauveBot: http://elf.planetquake.gamespy.com/mauvebot.zip.

It's a very, very simple bot for Darkplaces that can be plugged into any mod incredibly easily. The bot is dumb as hell, but that's because there are only 250ish lines of code in the whole thing

It should be a decent framework for building a DP bot, as it has nothing but the basics scetched out.

[ceriux]

awsome thanks!

[Team Xlink]

I hope this isn't a topic bump, it was on the first page still.

MauveBib, in the MauveBot, what exactly makes it DarkPlaces specific?

I assume these things might tie it to be DarkPlaces specific.

DP Extensions
(I am not sure if it uses this or not but a lot of DarkPlaces specific mods do.)

And

sv_user.qc
(This one I am not 100% sure on, but it is very good for AI it results ins some very realistic looking bots, the best example of a good use of it for AI is Electro's ShockBot, the most realistic bot I have seen so far it doesn't look like a bot, it looks like a human player.)


A bot that requires only 250 lines of code, is a very good base for a bot.

The MauveBot is as close to a bot template/skeleton that I could find.

[MauveBib]

Team Xlink: The whole thing is hugely DP dependant, especially the botclient and movement code etc, which is entirely handled by DP.

[FrikaC]

FrikBot was supposed to be a bot template/skeleton. I guess I failed.