Improving the bots

[mand1nga]

Thanks [-z-]

I think the bots can't see weapons at all, they can walk very close to a weapon without ever taking it, so it seems to me more like a waypoints issue.

And yes they behave the same being in a team or not, I've updated the tasks list with your comments.

[Alien]

Waypoints are automatically added for maps by engine for jump pads, armor/health and guns/ammo.

[Ed]

They are currently very selfish, run in straight lines towards items and are often hard to predict.

Just like a lot of real players it has to be said.

Waypoint prioritisation would be what causes not picking up items. They see the item but they also see something else which they go for instead.

[Alien]

What is that else? Any good player picks weapons and armor and bots do the same.

[mand1nga]

What is that else? Any good player picks weapons and armor and bots do the same.

Sure, for example in deathmatch mode this makes perfect sense. But for team game modes, like ctf, tdm, etc, the bots still will be picking up items and weapons in front of you, without caring if you just respawned near that nex.
Like any good team player bots should know a bit about which weapons/ammo their partners have, and a bot just can't do a better job compared to a human for most cases, not before this series of improvements

I think this will be my next move after getting my previous code reviewed. LIke Ed said, it seems that other waypoints are getting more relevance than weapon waypoints, it should be fixed somehow.

However now I'm just reading code related to this, I think I can make weapons more desirable for bots, and at the same time put there some creative algorithm querying the weapons, ammo, position, etc of every teammate before consider picking up items.

Thanks for that waypoint tip Alien, I hope you never find the exit of this trap I have confirmed it later by reading code.

[[-z-]]

Speaking of way points, here's one thing I'd REALLY like to see prioritized >> personal waypoints. I think it would be amazing if bots would respond to "help me" or "danger" etc.

[mand1nga]

Yes it would be really nice to have, like some days ago Dib suggested that the bots should handle mega[health|armor] timings for deathmatch mode(s). You know things like this are extremely hard to do, because bots are like the Memento guy, not carrying too much information about the map. But well I think this is still possible, it would require a major rewrite in the bots code.

Aside of this I want to say that I'm feeling a little discouraged because I didn't get any developer word/comment about my work yet. Only steel said he will be reviewing the patch, but it seems he is very busy on this days, and I understand that.

Now I'm working on parts of the code that can change a lot depending if my code goes in or not, ie: changes in same functions/methods. And as I do this for fun I really don't want to spend hours merging code.
I might sound a little angry but is not the case at all, just telling what I think

Should I ask for SVN write access? (This would be really cool)

[FruitieX]

Awesome stuff, keep this up!

It would be great to have bots that are actually _fun_ to play against, not just whatever we have now: walking around randomily, facing the walls, standing there like a stupid in front of you even if you have it on godlike difficulty, the list goes on. My #1 wish is to have strafejumping bots when the difficulty is set a little higher. THAT wolud add some feeling that you are playing against a good player, and not only a stupid bot.

[MRB 255]

I did a little tinkering with bots.qc. It looks like the bots assign a travel cost to each waypoint based on its distance. This is fine for dm, but other gamemodes (ctf) require going from point a to point b. So, even though in ctf the bots have code for defence, midfielding, intercepting and offense, they will always just sit there and gobble up items (2 feet away) instead of getting the flag (really far away) even though the flag has a higher "pickup value" to an offending bot than anything else. If the cost that the bots assign to distance is reduced, you can actually get the bots to cap on most maps with bot waypoints. Of course, an across the board reduction of travel cost breaks the bots in other ways, so prehaps some game objects (such as flags and fcs) should be flagged as having a reduced travel cost.

[Alien]

Bots would require fuzzy logic, that is their goals would have different "I want that" values based on the current situation and not only get armor, get health, get gun thing.