I heard people say this could be accomplished by making a singleplayer campaign listing assault maps, but I don't believe that can be anything close to a real single player system. This is my list of reasons as to why and what I believe a SP system would need to include:
1 - Single player is not a match. The architecture of the current gametypes is for players to fight each other while completing sport-like objectives, while in single player the objective is to advance from point A to point B while fighting characters on the way. The scoreboard for instance displays how many players there are, how many frags you have done, etc. which in SP it would need to be different. The player would have to start the map from the beginning when dieing, not just respawn like nothing happened... and no "You have fragged X" message when you kill a monster. I also don't see health regeneration belonging in single player.
2 - Biggest issue of them all: The current bot system does not allow any gametype to be used as single player. The only way one could poorly simulate a singleplayer map would be an assault map containing one player start for the real player and several other starts only for bots. And since the player is to be all alone against monsters like in most SP stories, the cvar bot_vs_human needs to be settemp-ed for each level too. Second problem is that bots are spawned randomly so you can't place a certain bot in a certain point on the map, nor can they be given different start weapons, health or skills (eg: a guardian guarding a door with the shotgun and another with the uzi). Imho no map can be truly called single player when bots are spawned randomly and are not individually configurable.
A second bot system would be needed for singleplayer, in which every monster bot is placed as an entity on the map. The normal bots can remain as they are while bots spawned by a monster entity are monster bots which have totally different rules. The entity would have all bot characteristics as keys, such as:
- bot_model - Points to the .zym model of the character to use.
- skin - The skin.
- pants_color
- shirt_color
- name - Name of the bot... can be "Guardian" if it's guarding a gate.
- health - How many hit points this bot is spawned with, separate from a normal player's health cvars.
- damage / skill - Damage overrider, to offset how much damage the bot can do from the current weapon's damage, allowing different bots to be stronger and bosses to be the much powerful then anyone else.
- pickup - If the bot should be allowed to pick up new weapons or health / armor, or if only to use what its given at spawn time.
- weapons - The weapons the bot spawns with, completely separate from g_start_weapon_X cvars which are for players. Would probably default to "laser, shotgun" and one can also empty it to leave a bot unarmed by default.
- respawn - How many times the bot may respawn. If 0 the bot is dead forever once its killed, and higher numbers would be how many times the bot respawns after death (one can set it to 10 to have to defeat 10 soldiers in a room). -1 would be an infinite spawner.
- team - If the bot is an ally or enemy of the player.
- follow - In case the bot is not an enemy, it follows the player everywhere after the player approaches it. eg: freeing a prisoner who then follows you everywhere and helps you.
There could probably be more, such as monster bots dropping special items upon death. Bot entities could also trigger events once all bot spawns are defeated, such as defeating a guard for a door to open. Another crucial possibility would be virtual teams, the player belonging to team 1 so a bot can be either an ally if team 1 too, or if not be an enemy to you and other bots who are from different teams.
3 - A feature which is always good in single player is a dialogue system. When the player approaches a bot which is not an enemy, he could press an action key and a message is printed on the screen. Dialogues could contain whole discussions of the form "me: clicked the bot - bot: answering! - me: answering back" (like in old console games
). A further addon could be players given many choices of answers (such as yes or no) in dialogues, each answer triggering a different event.
4 - A single player system almost always has the ability to load another map when reaching a certain point in the current map, while keeping all of your weapons and other items you are carrying through. Such a system would also need to include a save game ability, save and load anywhere. The system in the classic Unreal is a perfect example of what I mean. This can be replaced by the current campaign system, but a system to freely travel back and forth between maps with savegame ability included would be much better.
I know that's an annoying list of big features and all, but I wanted to say my 2 cents and hear what others think of this. Since I player the old Unreal I've been thinking about writing my own game stories in a system which would correctly allow going through maps and facing configured enemies in each point. I shall try to see if I can start by copying a current gametype into something else, then if I can create entities that can spawn monster bots. But yeah... is this possible to do, and is it wanted by other players as well?
