The Quake III Arena Bot (2001) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Quake III Arena Bot (2001) [pdf]

fabiensanglard.net

41 pointsmmh000017 comments

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.

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. :)

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

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.

Depends on what you value. Quake III, UT, Counter Strike all from an era where modding, map making, and self hosting were the norm. I used to run my own server with a collection of maps and mods that I liked in Unreal Tournament 99. I even wrote a few myself. It's what got me into programming.

Halo is often seen as the beginning of the end for these types of games. I'm just happy I was born early enough to have caught this previous era, if Halo had been the game of my youth with no options for tinkering or self expression my life might look a lot different.

Thanks for elaborating. Still, even that strikes me as a narrow recollection.

Early Id games had only the smallest modding capacity built-in (loading mostly), with the community stepping up with original tooling. There were also fewer games to play, which concentrated community efforts. Games were simpler too, which also made modding easier.

It was also daunting to make ones own game from scratch. Around 2000 friends and I failed repeatedly going down that path. (While the mods we made were mostly released.) Today it's so much easier to make games and even mod those based on common engines.

Dedicated servers are a loss yet they often had rampant cheating. They were also painful to setup and maintain compared to private party systems from the game creators. Hopefully with some tweaks to the law, they can be incentivized to open source their servers or at least keep them alive.

What? The custom Halo community is huge. Maps, gametypes, etc. Halo is what brought custom games to the console players.

'trad' in this sense mostly being the era of dedicated servers and the countless mods and whatnot that these games are known for. Some of the better bots during these years were done by modders who had access to do these things - Q3 included.

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?

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.

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