Shockbot - taking its first steps

[Electro]

Hello peoples!

I have been casually working on a bot for the past couple of months in the minimal spare time I have.

Here's a short clip of it playing a 3 "player" ffa on dm4:

Currently the bot supports any maps that don't have buttons or fancy lift things. This will obviously change as the bot is in its infancy. It currently has no concept of ledges (and therefore no avoidance of them) or jumping ai aside from a node being flagged to say 'jump' when the bot reaches it.

The bot is as close to a real client as you can get currently. No rankings stuff in qc, physics stuff is handled in the engine like real clients (no physics present in qc, aside from being in DP atm so it has sv_user.qc).

Node files for levels are external .node files that are loaded in on map load.
Bot personality files are external .bot files that contain a large amount of personality information for each individual bot made with my quick little app I have thrown together (viewable here - : requires .NET framework to use)

Both the app and the bots are a work in progress, and currently the bots have ridiculously good aim so aren't in a playable state by humans, although they have good fun against each other

At the moment the bots only use the name/shirt/pants/sensitivity information from the .bot file, but as i add features to the bot, obviously they will be making use of more and more values, until they're all being used. Hopefully it should greatly assist in making them a lot more human-like, as well as varying each bots playing abilities and styles drastically.

[Urre]

[xaGe]

..They really do move smooth! It looks more like a match between real players then bots... Good stuff...

[Orion]

[Electro]

[Sajt]

[Orion]

[Electro]

[Orion]

[xaGe]

[Electro]

Orion: my bot already has leading/prediction for projectiles... the WHERE to aim isn't a problem... it's the how to get there

Currently they turn smoothly.. but at a constant speed (based on the bots sensitivity value), i will be doing a lot more in-depth stuff with it when i get the time.

xaGe: yeah FrikbotCTF i did waaaaaay back Don't know where that ended up!
No, it's not what prompted me to work on my own bot. I've always liked AI, but have just been nothing more than fascinated by it... I've always had ideas of how to do things but never put them in to practice. Shockbot is me putting my ideas to practice

Shockbot will be able to play CTF. Ideally, the bot will be able to play in q2 and q3 modes. No this won't be run with q2 and q3, still everything in the progs.dat that's needed code wise.... but doing something as simple as dropping in the q3 pak0.pk3 and running an engine that can support the bot, load md3's and q3bsp files... and bam -

Will be able to play with q1 weapons on q3 maps, q3 weapons on q1 maps... q2 weapons on q1 maps... q2 weapons on q3 maps.. you get the idea.. will be able to mix/match everything. Also the player physics if everything goes to plan

Bots will be able to take orders, give orders.. communicate with each other etc.

[Urre]

Awesome shit mate, looking forward to a release. I must say it's really inspiring, to see something like this, hopefully I will also get a chance to work on some form of bots or otherwise cool combatants some time again. I stopped working on Urrebot because of speed issues (it turned out to be slower in practice than waypoint-based bots, even though the goal was to be faster), but I have since then had oh so many ideas for bots, and not limited to navigation either

I recall you said this was supposed to be a QW bot, did you give up on that plan?

[Electro]

Shockbot will work in both NQ and QW

Glad to hear I'm inspiring some people.

[redrum]

[Orion]