The Quake III Arena Bot (2001) [pdf]

https://fabiensanglard.net/fd_proxy/quake3/The-Quake-III-Arena-Bot.pdf

by mmh0000 • 2 years ago

41 17 2 years ago

causality02• 2 years ago

It is such a tragedy that a large percentage of modern multi-player games come with no options for bots. For example, it would be so lovely to be able to play the Master Chief Collection against customizable bots.

nomilk• 2 years ago

And bot AI doesn't have to be super smart to be fun to play against. I recall the erudition of John Romero in saying highly intelligent, patient bots are less fun; usually big, dumb enemies are the most fun.

Duke Nukem 64 bots were fun to play against. All they did was walk in the direction of the nearest opponent (with some left/right randomness), while hitting 'activate' (to could get through some doors), while shooting if an opponent was in sight. They didn't even change weapon (except automatically when a new one was picked up), and didn't avoid traps (pipebombs and laser trip bombs). Primitive yet so much fun.

TulliusCicero• 2 years ago

It kind of just depends on what the player likes, and the context.

If the enemy is supposed to be a super smart wizard, it'll feel stupid if it behaves in a dumb way.

dleslie• 2 years ago

I preferred Eliminator and Frogbot to the Reaper bot because they were simply a little less perfect in how they played. Reaper had a habit of dominating routes and circle strafing with deadly precision, which just wasn't fun.

yencabulator• 2 years ago

Bots can't be too smart or they won't be fun is true statement of all gaming automation, not just bots.

Left 4 Dead feels great to play because the "AI director" chooses what happens next based on how and what the co-op team is doing. It's programmed to be both merciful and unfair, as appropriate. That, tuned right, has you "riding the edge" though the whole experience.

(I guess in the future, game studios will use ML instead of manually-tuned rules and heuristics, for that balance.)

vunderba• 2 years ago

Completely agree. I actually think there's a huge opportunity for game companies to create bots that have been fine tuned on notable players, former tournament champions, etc. so then you have your base AI bots, and if players want they can essentially purchase virtualized opponents.

What Quake player didn't want to pit their skills against Dennis Fong back in the day?

Of course there would need to be someway to adjust the difficulty while retaining the famous players stratagems otherwise 99% of casual players will get crushed. :)

4ntiq2• 2 years ago

Strange to bring up Master Chief when the downfall of trad PC gaming that you miss began with xbros.

paulryanrogers3• 2 years ago

Has PC gaming fallen in any meaningful sense? And what is 'trad' PC gaming?

It seems stronger than ever to me, and I started in 1993. Consoles are becoming more PC like. PCs can now be more console like, if one so desires. In many ways we get the best of all worlds.

paulryanrogers3• 2 years ago

Unreal Tournament had bots and a lot of mutators, which I sorely miss in modern games. It really added to the fun even when friends were present.

declan_roberts• 2 years ago

Similar in Timesplitter you could play coop against bots, which is great for me since I wasn't into PvP.

somat• 2 years ago

Pulsar: lost colony, which is a spaceship bridge simulator game has an amazing bot interface. It is nowhere near as good as playing with friends. but it lets you play alone or to fill the ranks if you can't find four other people to play with. You can tell they put a lot of work in the ui exposing what is a complex subject and I found it a lot of fun trying to tune the bots to my play style.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ppXovo4DeOc/maxresdefault.jpg

Maro• 2 years ago

I don't work in the gaming industry, but it feels to me that engineering a bot like this is a dead art going forward, and that makes me sad. Looking forward (today?) I assume this will be solved by training a black box neural network. Iirc In the AlphaZero paper they train bots to play chess against each other, and thus pull the thing up to 3000+ ELO by its own hair. I guess the same works for FPS bots, and you can save different ELO strength bots, so different level players have enjoyable bot opponents?

rcarmo• 2 years ago

I don’t see it that way. Fuzzy logic is always likely to be a part of input processing and goal seeking, since a neural network won’t ‘learn’ on the fly.

The Quake III Arena Bot (2001) [pdf]

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