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Comment by flogic | Hacker News Reader

Playing against a bot programmed to fight intelligently and efficiently just wouldn't be fun for long. A friend and I tried playing against the Reaper bot in Quake years ago. It mopped the floor with us. Which in terms of my skill probably doesn't mean much but my friend was really good at Quake. The bot didn't let up, didn't pause, memorized weapon locations, move at a constant run, and never missed. It would even jump, 180, and beam you with a rocket. That made for fun novelty one evening but no one wants that for multiple levels.

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There's a difference between a bot that's been programmed to act intelligently and a bot with superhuman abilities and reflexes. You can have the first part without the second.

League of Legends is a really good example of this. They've done a pretty good job of gimping their bots considering that simple player-made bots can be competitive at the highest levels of ranked play.

>player-made bots can be competitive at the highest levels of ranked play

Any source for this? I refuse to believe it.

Many of the useful abilities in League of Legends are 'skill shots' - manually aimed, with travel time and wind-up animation, and are thus missable or dodgeable

With superhuman reflexes, a bot can be nearly immune to skillshots in a 1-on-1 scenario. A bot can also always hit skillshots, up to its accuracy of prediction of your movement, and your reflexes in dodging.

In theory, a team of humans might demonstrate better teamwork, communication, and adaptation than a team of 5 AI. However, given how much of the game depends on mechanical 1v1 conflicts, I'd expect a simple bot to beat even the most expert human players.

I bet that a game AI model of a human mind's executive function would actually be embarrassingly simple. Something like a 7 element ring buffer of tasks and their parameters, with interrupts. When the bot tries to remember or do more than 7 things, it just starts forgetting stuff, which it might notice again later. Just like me.

Agreed. This is why single player game AI can be made fun with simple FSMs and logic models.

F.E.A.R.s bots are by no means intelligent - they're really dumb and predictable, at least once you've played through a couple times - you know that they're going to seek another angle when they get blocked, and there's only a couple options for them to do that -

but it's fun when you're playing enemies who are seeking another angle, even a simple one. Compared to the other games on the market. F.E.A.R. remains the best FPS I've played.

The reaper bot was a good start, but it wasn't until the Frogbot[1] was released that Quake bots really came of age.

[1] http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/botarea51/main/qbot7429.ht...

Side note: I regularly played against the Frogbot's author (who used the handle Frog) at LANs. He was reknowned for being the most analytical and "bot-like" player of our scene.

>my friend was really good at Quake

no, he wasnt:( he was just better than you. Reaper on default skill 1 was an ok challenge for average players. Skill 3 was a competitive against good players, but still nothing special against deathmatch veteran spending days in gaming cafes or internet servers.

For reference best Quake bot, Omicron(dev went to work for ID software and wrote Quake3 AI etc) on highest skill level vs actually good dm player https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEeDXPkEnME

also https://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/11/10/yanss-podcast-036-wh...

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