I'd rather have all engies played by AI units, so players don't have to be Bob the Builder all the time.
You don't have to have them use player slots, and I woud have thought the ability to kick them for players is a basic function of most bots which do use player slots... Do use your head.
In every game I've played bots took up player slots. AND it takes away from the game if buildings automatically build themselves. And I'm saying like. It's a 15v15 match, but I have 2 bots on my team. I can't kick them without having uneven teams that who knows how long it'll take to fix.
... The game kicks the bots when players join, players then replace the bots. Or in empires it would probably be more along the lines of kicking the bots when a player joins a team so that the numbers are the same but a player has replaced a bot, which is how RCbot does it for natural selection. I really don't see how you can not know that if you've played games with bots before, and I also don't see why empires has to do it the same way the games you've played have in all places. Yes it does take away from the game if buildings don't completely require people to stare at them to build them and run half a mile to build a refinery on the other side of the map, it takes a lot of staring at buildings and running across half miles out of the game. As I'm not that masochistic I have no objection to that.
I think bots have one great purpose: training servers. Create a server that perma-runs Urban Chaos. Fill it with 20 bots, with room for some players. Direct newbies to this server for their first game, so then can get familiar with the classes and weapons, and limited tank use.
Pretty much. You could also start implementing some 24/7 servers of stuff like escort and money to help newbs learn.
Or implement it like Savage so that you use them to build and scout and get resources but they're worthless in a fight. Never EVER use AI to train new players. they are often stupid and will inevitably have exploits that new players learn to take advantage of. And plus, there's nothing interesting about playing a AI in this type of game. It doesn't train them or guide them, it makes a lame waiting pool that they can thrash around in a bit. AI bots almost never train people properly for the internet.
Don't listen to him he's just trolling. ScardyBob: NavMesh is disabled in Empires because we haven't used bots earlier. It's a matter of good idea and some time to implement it.
the bots are controlled completely by the commander. They wouldn't be movin by themselves like in counter-strike. It would be bots like in an rts.
It's not a problem after all, but your response is poorly thought out. What if theres a building between the bots and their order?
Well I think it would be cool to have some maps with HL2 fast zombies and hostile mg turrets scattered around. Just to break up the 'rush here, put up rax, rush here, drop refs'
Could you still manually build a nav file and include it in a plugin? I think this is how RCBot2 is doing it for TF2.
Hence why I suggest not making them computer controlled players, instead make them a separate unit which will always be present and can be instructed to perform basic tasks. Have each major building automatically create a couple of little wheeled/tracked robots, and have them automatically try to repair damaged structures near them and build new ones the comm places. Give them a small weapon, weak, but effective against both infantry and tanks at close range so they can defend a base slightly, and get them to automatically perform tasks, like as aforementioned repair and construct buildings, also consider disarming mines, repairing friendly tanks, healing friendly infantry, resupplying ammo, that sort of thing. Basically get them to support players near them. The commander can order them around the map but by default the stay around their buildings. Giving them an order on an existing building will tell them to commence their patrolling activities around that building, and they can also be ordered to return to their home building with a button on their control panel. They can operate much slower than players at repairing and healing but they should be able to be useful, maybe two can work as good as a basic engineer without repair upgrade. They should be something players like having around and want to destroy when attacking a base, and which can also perform basic tasks the commander needs doing and which players may not want to do, like building structures, repairing the base, disarming mines, and defending against lone scouts. They should be vulnerable to small arms fire but be maybe 1.5 times as tough as a player. Then they go around it... I explained how modifying a navmesh would not be complex or network intensive.
Chris, I know, but his idea was the buildings don't need to be considered by the bots at all. Which means for all intents and purposes, they keep hitting invisible walls.
It'd be cool if players could direct some of the bots. They'd be like rebels in HL2 as for the extent of control.
Why not? It wouldn't make them superskilled players, but they learn the basics of how to spawn, building stuff, getting ammoz without newbing up servers. Its basically like having a pseudo-in game tutorial. If a newb is going to jump into a server without having read the manual/having a clue about the basic controls, I'd rather they jump on a bot server than a player server.
hm... dynamic pathfinding you say. If only someone had already solved this problem.... It becomes a waste of resources if you make bots simply to do newbie training. It's partitioning the players and saying go mess around over here for a while and stumble upon how to become competent when they can do the exact same thing, only faster, in a real server. However, if you make bots to try and train higher-level players it's pointless because bots for this type of game pale in comparison to human players. If you want newbs to jump in w/o reading a manual and still be able to play w/o ragequitting, make the in-game help and UI easier to understand.
