LAN server with bots

[Jester45]

Hello first of all i love nexuiz

second after playing online for a while i decided to run a dedicated server for my LAN, it is working pretty well with 24 bots + a few humans but i would like to know if its possible to have the bot's AI run on a separate process or a few different processes. the reason im asking this is my home server is a quad xeon and nexuiz is only using 1 CPU at a time and i would like to increase the number of bots but the CPU is almost maxing out (i don't want to go over ~80% usage) the single CPU while the other 3 are idling.

I dont know if this would require a "worker" process to compute the AI or if the server could fork itself. Maybe someone could give some magic fix to this

the server is running Debian testing 32bit
4 Intel Xeons @ 2.4ghz
4GB 233 DDR ram
4x500GB drives (software raid 1+0)
1x150GB 10k OS drive
nexuiz dedicated server 2.4.2

my server config is here http://paste2.org/p/79743

[Ed]

Unfortunately that's not possible with the engine currently. It is not multithreaded.

[Jester45]

What about using the AI to run "bot" clients. would sdl/X be needed for that to work.

im sorry if these sound stupid but i dont know how to code so i cant really read the source and dont know all to much about the engine

[take_this_cup_of_poison]

Bots really do eat up cpu like hell.
Could they be coded better?
When they're too much for a map I do:
bot_ai_strategyinterval 10000

Gets rid of much of the load.

[Ed]

What about using the AI to run "bot" clients. would sdl/X be needed for that to work.

That's not the issue actually. The problem is that the bots are server side as they are with just about every game. This would need someone to code a bot client.

24 bots sounds insane. You would save a lot of CPU time by cutting the number of bots. I've never played a Nexuiz game with over 20 players and most games on the Internet are only a handful of players so it's not as if you need that kind of player count to make a game fun.

Could they be coded better?

Perhaps. I would say that CPU overhead of the bots isn't that great a priority though as there actually AI could do with some work instead, they're certainly not as good a bot as those in some commercial games. Good does not mean unbeatable however. Good means human like.

When they're too much for a map I do:
bot_ai_strategyinterval 10000

I'm not sure that's a good idea at all. That makes them a lot worse at playing the game in a human like manner.

[Jester45]

Well its not just for practice because i can kill them quickly with a few rockets but because i like to try things out and the number of bots is really strange.

On a side note im setting a 2nd server up at my computer networking class, not sure if it will help us learn but it will be fun to have 15 humans + 30ish bots playing