lOkO Q2 Bot and MegaMod

[loko13]

Greetings all!

A new version of my bot and weapons megamod has been released at www.angelfire.com/jazz/loko . The bot plays most of the maps from the map author's who post here, including maps with jump pads (leray33, marics_space et. al.).
Please check it out!

The blurb ...

The lOkO bot is a Quake2 deathmatch/CTF bot with it's own whack weapons mega mod; you can turn off the weapons mod and play straight Q2 deathmatch, emulate the lithium mod or completely customize game play.

The bot navigates jump pads, wind tunnels, platforms, teleporters, ladders, secret doors, shootable buttons, uses the off-hand hook and jetpack, plays deathmatch, capture the flag and "feed the mutant" (sorta like head-hunters); bots can respawn across level changes. Playing CTF you can command the bots on your team to defend your flag, attack the enemy flag, patrol an area, travel specific routes, roam the level, etc. or let the bots choose their own roles.

Built in bot route support for over 1500 deathmatch, single player and CTF maps.

Multiple alternate fire modes for all weapons including lightning gun, flamethrower, homing rockets, cluster grenades, freeze supershotgun, pipe bombs, etc.

Additional Techs: Ammo Regen, Vampire, Jet Pack, Lightning Defense, Voodoo.

Deathmatch Monsters: spawn a monster to fight for you or your CTF team or plant respawning monsters on the level you get bonus points for fragging.

Add any item to any map without recompiling the map; play Capture the Flag on any map (with bots), add additional deathmatch spawn points, powerups, health, weapons, ammo, team flags, etc.

OpenGL fog, weapons banning, instagib, starting weapons, ammo, armor and health, togglable Pro-Rocket, off-hand hook, radar scanner, togglable location damage scoring, active laser sight, ammo hud, third person perspective and more.

Sorry, MS Windows only ...

[grieve[Q2C]]

Well, after a first test : weird ... impressive. Just to think about the amount of work that went into this.
It's running well and didn't even crash.

I found the regular Ace bots always way too stupid, but yours are greatly improved. Really smart, nasty fellas.

Learning all new commands and weapons of such a mod requires time, though.

The weapons are a bit too crazy for me, I don't like extreme weapon mods like Lox. And what I saw resembled a mix between Lox and Awaken 2.
But of course you can set it up with regular vanilla weapons too ? Ah yeah, you said so.

Hmm, my guess is, however, that the bots will be toast when fighting plain vanilla style deathmatch with usual weapons. The smart use of this weird weaponry is their strong point, but not extreme deathmatch skills. ( rather smarties than skillerz




You should make sure that your bot/mod gets posted over there at PlanetQuake, so that bigger parts of the Quake community are able to discover it.

All in all, really impressive work.

[loko13]

Thanks for playing, Grieve, and thanks for the kind words!

Yes there are tons of cvars and commands to learn, the lokoquikstart.txt file in the zip summarizes the major stuff if you don't want to wade into the huge manual.

The svstatus command will display most all the server cvar settings so you don't have to remember them.

To use just the default Quake2 weapon fire modes set the server cvar weapons_mode to 0; the default value of weapons_mode is 2 which allows all firemodes.

If you want the bot to play absolute plain vanilla Quake2 deathmatch with no bells/whistles the config file straightdm.cfg included in the zip turns virtually all modifcations off (except the gibbed heads bouncing around ...).

[Le Ray [Q2C]]

Hello loko 13 and welcome to the Cafe'.

Thanks for giving us the link to your mod.

I can't check it out myself, but hopefully others will be able to test it for you.

Enjoy your stay on the Cafe'.

[grieve[Q2C]]

Okay, I played some rounds with the bots again, this time in Imminent Demise and Dedalo.

After using straightdm.cfg, I was able to win in Demise, but it was still not that easy. I noticed that they like to camp teleporters, so I finally started doing the same

Their telefrag-awareness seems really good, also their grenade-awareness. But their somewhat campy behavior makes it easy to predict them after a while.

Sure, it is bad style to camp teleporters anyway. Maybe it would be better to lower their willingness to use teleporters at all ? They are too rewarding targets for campers.

Dedalo is a map I play a lot with 3rd-Ziggok bots, and as expected I fragged them away in there ( also with the straightdm.cfg )

Something I have to reclaim is that you still have the hooks in "straightdm" ( Yes, both of them. The lithium style laser hook and the ctf hook as well ). Under no circumstances this is really vanilla DM when you got a hook. There should be the option to completely turn them off.

Sometimes their tendency to camp weapon spawn points turned into a real weakness, especially when I started to do the same. Then they came towards me and gave me easy frags, when they should have run away.

In other situations they are pretty clever. Of course they win most of the time with the weapon mod turned on, because I can't handle these new weapons very good.

But at least I found out that you get more kills with the ctf grapple hook than with the usual blaster.

All in all, I had a lot of fun with this bot and will surely use it again. Some AI tweaks can make it even better. The more challenge they are, the more fun.

Oh, and don't forget to send it to PlanetQuake. Why should only 20 persons know about it ?

[loko13]

Hey Le Ray, thanks for the greets. Nice maps, dude, make more!

Grieve, thanks for that feedback. Would like to know the skill level of the bots you played against, how many bots on the map, etc...

Camping? A kinder word for confused perhaps...
No, no camping AI here. The map Immenent Demise map (a favorite map of mine,btw) has a series of back-to-back-to-back teleporters/destinations that let you navigate the map quickly; the bots always choose the shortest path to their destination, using a teleporter to navigate a large distance is "rewarded" when computing the shortest path; the bot "hears" the sounds of other players/bots shooting weapons, picking up items, screaming from pain as well as sound of teleporting and "remembers" the location the sound was made for a few seconds; a healthy well armed bot with no visible enemy will almost always choose to navigate to the place a sound has been made recently, on Immenent Demise bots will certainly be using those teleporters a lot, to the point that it looks like they're camping the teleporters. Try setting the server cvar bot_sound_perception to 0, this will lessen the likelyhood that bots will "cluster" in high traffic areas following sounds and lead to less centralized combat.

Or it cound just be the bot is disoriented from accidently walking into one of the teleporters by mistake...

All that said, excellent idea to allow variance in the bot's preference for teleporter use, control freak that I am, will add to next version.

hook and grapple: yeah, I really don't let you ban the hook or the grapple, so I should not say you can play "straight" deathmatch, I will add these capabilities in the next version. I didn't want to ban the ctf grapple coz bots use it exclusively when they want to gib a corpse to harvest it's head (gotta read that manual...).

For now, though, you can "simulate" straight deathmatch without bots using the hook and grapple...
set the cvar sticky_grapple to 0 (set this way in the config file straightdm.cfg) so the bots really won't use the grapple for anything (except to "tarzan" out of lava/slime) and set the cvar no_hook_navigation to 1 so the bots won't use grapple nodes when navigating the map (on some maps this is icky, read the manual for the explanation). The grapple and hook will still be in your inventory, bots would have to trust that you won't use the hook or grapple, they can trust you, right?

And yes, planet quake soon, but this board appears to be the center of the active quake2 universe...

Again, thanks for the feedback and ideas.

[Wixen1 [Q2C]]

Wow, this semes complecated....