FerBotz (new AI, XCGE release 20)

[JackGriffin]

BTW, anyone has a tool or program to strip code quickly? I have lots of classes and don't feel like erasing code from each one at a time.

http://www.hofgamingclan.com/forum/topi ... IC_ID=6244

If you need some help working out the actual strip let me know. You can quickly strip source off the compiled U without obfuscating. PM me though if you want to use it and I'll explain a few things you ought to know.

[UT99.org]

I am practically sure I have this but can not remember the name http://unrealtournament.99.free.fr/utfiles/
come from Gopo or The danes

[JackGriffin]

Medor I appreciate your helping *every single time* you see someone post a file, but how about easing up some? There are other people with files posted, we can live without your site link on every one of them. Myself, I'm starting to find it quite fatiguing as it is becoming more 'advertising' than 'helping'. You keep posting files you don't ask permissions to host and honestly you should ease up some as I have said before to you. I'm probably the most liberal person you'll find with my source code but it's even beginning to really irritate me (and that's saying something).

I posted the help to him, have the courtesy to let me finish please without attempting to hijack it.

[UT99.org]

Medor I appreciate your helping *every single time* you see someone post a file, but how about easing up some? There are other people with files posted, we can live without your site link on every one of them. Myself, I'm starting to find it quite fatiguing as it is becoming more 'advertising' than 'helping'. You keep posting files you don't ask permissions to host and honestly you should ease up some as I have said before to you. I'm probably the most liberal person you'll find with my source code but it's even beginning to really irritate me (and that's saying something).

I posted the help to him, have the courtesy to let me finish please without attempting to hijack it.

It is true that I have recently criticized the resolution requires that you have with the new mapvote. In the past the same for the scoreboard MH2.
I am not happy to be forced to see the scoreboards and other displays using a new résolution. We can not be adored per all the world!

I did not watch the poster's name before I answer ( JackGriffin AKA Gopostal ? )
I'm at 100/100 sure the thing for obfuscate been released publique.

I know you can live fully and and you manage without me.
You esy smart in your area But in "etiquette" you did not have direct me to.
As you know if we count the number post you are in conflict ....I believe not be worse than you... As we say " We can not be adored per all the world".


I do not understand the subtleties of the English language and I know you are the king of the great debates interminable.
That's why I give my opinion a single faith and would not make endless speeches.

So I'll let you have the last word without answering

[JackGriffin]

What does this have to do with scoreboards and resolution and who is 'beloved' more? You keep vacuuming up files without asking permission then posting your link on every thread you see. The people here are trying to be nice to you and show you why you shouldn't do that but you continue onward regardless. It's just amazing to me how your English suddenly gets so much worse when you need it to...

All I have asked is for you to let up off the gas a little. This has nothing to do with how much you have annoyed me or if I'm more of a jerk than you are. You've had this explained to you in multiple forums including a couple of times here but it falls on deaf (understanding?) ears. I just find that a sad excuse since you obviously can interpret the readme's for the mods you use just fine but my couple of lines to you are simply unintelligible.

Higor, my apologies for this and I fully expect a reprimand from the admins but I'm just tired of every link posted getting hijacked by him so he can advertise his site. We get it medor, trust me. Everyone knows 'you have it' because you've sucked up every single thing you've found no matter if you should or not. I'll tell you this though: it's exactly why I stopped helping MHA. If you can't respect people's work I'm not going to do anything for you.

Interpret that.

[Feralidragon]

I don't want anyone to reply to this post, so after this one I only want to see on-topic stuff, any attempt to reply to this or any of the above 3 posts will result in a temporary ban from either of you.
Having guys like Higor around is a rarity these days for this game, so let's not derail the topic anymore, ok?

@medor: Jack already provided a specific link and help, so there was absolutely no need to provide a link to your entire directory of files.
You may want to help, and helped a lot so far by providing specific links, but that last post wasn't helpful at all (it was like: "here you have it, good luck finding it...").
Also, he never mentioned anything relative his mapvote, so why bringing it up exactly? To create more havoc? Please behave, you're not like this.

@Jack: Please behave as well. Medor may not have done the right thing, but if you don't like his ways you can perfectly add him to your foes list and keep peace (and this applies to anyone who has a problem with anyone else). If he does something way out of the ordinary (like any member in this forum), we staff shall deal with it, so don't derail someone else's topic please (at max write a PM to medor or us instead).

So you both acted wrong in a topic which is not yours, please behave both of you, you both are better than that.

Now: on topic below this line. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Old UT Veteran]

Wow, this is just amazing. A total game changer for players that have played this game for a long time. I have tested the new AI myself and was quite impresed by it. Just a few questions if Higor you may answer:

1. Will the botZ be able to strafe to objectives, like the ones in UT2k4?
2. Can the botZ, feight death?

Those are my only questions, and I am sorry for my language. English is not my first one
It would be great if the players could pick against which bot they would like to play. This is just an idea of mine that I got while spectating BOTZ VS. UT Bots.

Either way

[Higor]

I don't exactly understand what you mean with strafing to objectives, english isn't exactly my first language as well.

About feigning death, now that I think about it, I never took that in mind when coding this, so BotZ will most likely attack others feigning death.
Making them do that would be kinda tricky, even I have to do some serious thinking to when it is appropiate to feign death online, making a botz do the whole analisis may be a bit too much for me.
(I do feign death online, rarely, in Face to wait for the enemy flag carrier without getting killed by a sniper, or in siege when i have a strong weapon and don't want to get killed before i reach my target)

The BotZ vs Bot is something I always do, as a matter of fact, I tend to add Loque and Tamerlane among Bots and I side with the BotZ.
About choosing the enemy, that's an idea i find highly attractive, that's the same reason that led me to install MapMixter in UT3, which let me chose teammates, and dynamically bias teams according to map parameters.
Maybe incorporating a different match setup interface (like map mixer does) with an extra tab (botz config) would allow to quickly setup matches according to recommended player count and to bias/assign Botz+bots to a team.

Another thing I've done is to code a kinda rough team balancer myself (has strength meter like AutoTeamBalance) and simply add all BotZ + Bot and let the balancer do it's logic.
If I ever release anything interface related, it will be done using another package that is dated older than the FerBotz itself (which has 4 years of occasional work into it) that contains lots of interesting mods/mutators + general window interface to hook various mutator windows into a master window...
But that's something for another day.


Edit:
A planned feature is the faction mode.
Would be something like this:
mutate addbotzfaction marine 5
Meaning it would add 5 botz using skin and names either being Malcom, Riker, Othello, Aryss, Azure, Olga, Annaka or Ryanna.

[Old UT Veteran]

Yes, that would be good.

I am not an AI coder so I apologize if i threw in a couple of crazy ideas. Its best if you focus on your work first, and then throw in some extra stuff that does not have to be necessary feigh death. Most players don't even know about it, I would agree on that with you.

Sorry about confusing before about that strafing to objective, I should have been more specific. If you ever played ut2k4..... the bots in larger maps would strafe left, right or forward to catch up on speed. Being the first one to reach their objective; shield or other inventory. Whenever I play online with human controled players, I can tell that they use their dodging abilities to move faster. Ex. Double pressing the forward key would result in a flip. The only time I see Ut bots do that is when they are jumping off some sort of a platform. I am not really sure how would this change the game if the bots started doing all of those flips. Will it look weird or
It would be good if they could perform such actions from time to time on a higher skill; 5 or 6.

Ok, I hope that I have answered your question. Again if you think those ideas sound crazy, forgive me. I never actually worked on AI. It really is a difficult concept, with all that AI. I can tell that people will start forming those botZ clans because they would be able to do all of this stuff. For example the botZ being able to teleport quicly is a great and major add on. You are basically changing the bots from medium to pros. We can both agree on that people didn't really knew about that transloc + impact combo until later. If you have any questions or need new ideas I would be happy to figure something out. It is best to make the most realistic AI, before releasing it to the public.

[Higor]

Ah, dodging, that's something I've had in mind as well.
It's among planned features.

[Old UT Veteran]

Hey Higor its me again.

Just out of curiosity, do you know how hard would it be to make UT bots perform similar actions as botZ can. Such as continues translocation, impact + translocator and far view sniping. Since you were able to accomplish that with your own custom AI, I would like to know because it would be nice if they could also do such. You are the expert so I think this is a proper question to ask. If ever could you make a custom Botpack.u file and just upload it or something. I think that you are prodably busy enough with your current work and life. I am just sick of CTF-Face + Bots = BOOM HEadSh0t. If this an inappropriate question or something I will erase this post and start a diffrent forum/ board; I dont know the diffrence . I think that u are the guy that can help. Sorry about the language. Not my first...

[papercoffee]

If this an inappropriate question or something I will erase this post and start a diffrent forum/ board;

If some one answers to your post ...you are prohibited to delete your post.

Well not really prohibited, but if you do so I'll whack you with a newspaper !!!
Don't start this bad habit.

BTT guys ...

[Higor]

Newer UT 'controller' approach would have made that a lot easier, subclassing (hypotethic) BotController would have been a nice choice to have.
But since the Pawn and the AI are not separate, it's not as attractive, here are some of the reasons I didn't employ Bot AI as base...

- Bot code outside of Bot.
This is a real problem, weapons, navigation points, triggers, translocators, game infos all have code that directly affect the Bot AI, these don't send notifications to the AI but instead modify or change AI states.
So the entirety of Bot code isn't inside Bot, which means 2 things, subclassing Bot would make it subject to this outside code, subclassing Pawn (like i did) would not be affected by this code.

- Pawn-Ai link.
Bot has varying subclasses, one per mesh.
BotZ was intended from the very beginning to work like Valhalla Avatar, one Pawn, many meshes supported by it, emulating the 'controller' approach.

- Aim system.
Bot doesn't aim, weapon does it for it, this means that aim is directly controlled by a few FRand() statements which do not account for velocity, direction, prediction...
BotZ always calls UpdateEyeHeight() like a playerpawn does and weapon only fires at where BotZ is looking at, this way the BotZ view rotation is the actual aim and in most cases is updated one tick behind + prediction, so quickly moving left and right can cause misses, even on maximum accuracy bots (no annoying loques).

- Code to rewrite was more than 80%.
Why subclass Bot and rewrite nearly all of it, this way I don't have to worry about all those states/functions/variables that were already defined and I wasn't going to use.

- Separation between Bot and BotZ
Useful for server filling, and KillAll commands.


Of course, there are a few disadvantages to this, I had to figure out a way to make BotZ interact with Bot-only waypoint system which is present in nearly all maps, it's a kinda slow approach but gave me more freedom to make the BotZ act accordingly.
I also had to hack the translocator, the BotZ translocator posseses own outside code that only interacts with BotZ, because it's easier to let the translocator target decide how and when to teleport instead of having to process that in BotZ.

I'm going to have lots of time this week, anything you want?

[Old UT Veteran]

Mhhh, there is no way I could do that
Thank You for all the info, I will just stick to mapping. I appreciate you offering help but now that I think about it.........
Don't worry, just work on your BotZ. Don't forget to keep us updated.

[Higor]

Updated first post

- Changelog in 4th public revision.

Reduced taunt spamming in net games.
Reduced likeliness to get stuck in translocation chain.
No more log spamming in MonsterHunt and Coop games.
Firing is done more intelligently: less suicides, less teamkills, now with spamming.
Fixed doublejump issue.
Little code optimization.
Some dead animations now play on some meshes.
CTFGame map plugin does better tasking.
MonsterHunt plugin doesn't crash anymore, allows map plugins to add MonsterWaypoints, faster code.
Extra map plugins.