Call me clueless, testing levels. use slomo.

[Red_Fist]

OK this is so obvious, so it's really not a tip, but in all these years silly me never used it while I only want to see if the bots act correctly at a certain point for a SP map or MH.

After all these years why I never thought to just crank slomo up higher , I can now see what happens during each map edit, pertaining to watching bots. I set slomo to 16. I need to let them play without interference. But for an even better test I use one bot on novice, but don't have to wait. On this map MH I am making it would take a long time for one novice bot.

I could find the bad spots of the map pathing, or should I say problem areas, in record time. If you can make one bot go through the level without snags, speaking of MH right now. When you add a few more bots they rip through the map like nothing.
and I don't have to wait and wait for the bot to arrive at my test area, and not having to change things and mess up the map flow.

so I just type in slomo 16 , or whatever speed you need, I spent so many hours waiting for the bots to get to a problem point, now I can watch-em.

[Higor]

Interesting approach, I used to simply give them Super Shock Rifles to clear their way quicker

[papercoffee]

No... call ME clue less.
What is the "slomo" command ...I know only the Game-speed setting.

[Hellkeeper]

Papercoffee: Slomo is basically a way to change GameSpeed in-game. It's an in-game command you can use in the console to change how fast the game goes: just like you'd type Addbots 8 to add 8 bots to the map, you type Slomo X, where X is the speed you want.

The usual use is to set Slomo 0.5 or something like this to have the game run at half speed (with 1 being the normal speed). This setting is unaffected by the game speed selected when launching the game (ie: hardcore, turbo, normal, etc.), meaning if you launch the game with Game Speed 200% and type Slomo 1, the game goes down to 100% speed. Game Speed 200% (the maximum you can set in the UI) is basically equivalent to the Slomo 2 command.

Despite it being named "slomo", it can both slow down and speed up your game, because the value you enter is a multiplier: 0.5 will have the speed of the game be 1*0.5 = 0.5. (half-speed). 2 will be 2*1 = double speed. As you can guess by the previous paragraph, the multiplier is always used with the normal 100% speed: typing slomo 2 twice will not make the game 2*2 = 4 times faster, because the second 'slomo 2' command will be ignored (since the game is already at 200% speed).

And yes, it is very nice for bot-testing. I myself used it recently in my CTF-Senate for UT2004 when I needed to test the 60~ jumpspots on the map : launch the game, type ReviewJumpSpots and set slomo 16: everything will be done in less than a minute, and you can exit the game and check the log for problems. Likewise, to test if the bots used the attack paths I had set, just put the camera somewhere on the road, launch a bot-match and set slomo 20 (2000% speed, now that's just silly). If at some point you see a bot going through this route with the flag, then it works.

EDIT: and yes, this changes real game-speed, not just how fast players and projectile moves. With slomo 2, pickups will also respawn twice as fast, etc. However, the time-limit is independant of the speed setting, so even with Slomo 30, a time limit of 1 minute will actually take 1 real-world minute (when it should take 2s at the game's speed).

[Spectra]

I remember I had the bot pathing issues on my AS map AS-IGI-FindingTheBomb where I was finding difficult in bot pathing because the bots were too much stupid.
In order to make the bots work smarter I used Mind Reader mutator to know whats wrong with them. Later I come to know the bots were heading to wrong Fort Standards like when 1st objective is completed, they straight head to the last objective. So I had to swap the Fort Standards for the bots.

But I never used that slomo command. Yet a nice Bot testing.

Mind Reader: http://www.uncommonplace.com/games/mindreader.html

[Red_Fist]

Interesting approach, I used to simply give them Super Shock Rifles to clear their way quicker

Yes, I also put those at the start of this level for testing, between that and slomo 16 One bot can go through the map while watching for some snag.
After fixing, an already good botpathing that 16 bots could march right through, now if I add just 4 bots it's like my 16 used to do.

The main drawback is if you have to move, you need to just pulse the key since you move too fast. Otherwise spectating in MH hit F5 will do.

[Feralidragon]

I also used slomo a bit when I tested the bots with my weapons, but I must warn you guys to use slomo with moderation, and the reason is simple: if the game gets too fast, you will get inaccurate results, specially during spawns, detection of frame rate and most of all: physics.
The physics engine is *greatly* affected by this, since the way the engine calculates the physics is by treating non-linear calculations as linear (which is the wrong way to do it), leading to differences between game speeds and tick rates (this is specially noticeable in online servers, that's why you get a more accurate view of the world when the server tickrate matches or at least is close to your own). By non-linear I mean anything that involves acceleration, like gravity and projectiles acceleration from base speed to max speed, since the way the engine calculates the next position of the actor based on it's physics is by linear incrementation, which is the cheapest way to do it, when the correct tickrate/gamespeed independent way to do it is by calculating the instant velocity by taking the start position as the origin of the acceleration curve and the time that has passed so far since then, which although is not as direct as a linear incrementation, it's almost as cheap to do.

So whenever a bot jumps, or he throws a grenade, or falls, or launches a flak, or a missile, or a ripper blade, anything that involves acceleration (and thus variable instant speed over time), it's likely that you will get some different behaviors from base game speed to super game speed. Just keep that in mind.

[Hook]

Oh cool - this may be a good way also to capture some in-game pictures that are normally hard to capture at regular speeds.
(like beautiful explosions, etc.)
Thanks Red_Fist