I think it would be a good idea for archiving purposes to include a zip of the source with each release, placed alongside the binary in the Sourceforge download page.
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Just thought I'd post some feedback from one of my clan mates. This guy doesn't hand out praise easily, so focus on the positive stuff. All in all I'd say 1.04 is a great success and a big improvement, thanks for the work that went into it.
Modest Genius wrote:
well the bots were at lot nastier in four specific ways:
-they're a lot harder to kill (probably due to taking upgrades)
-they hide around corners and cloak
-they tend to all come rushing at the base at once (although this may just be due to spawning together). similarly, they tend to all save up for fade or onos together, so just as you're leaving your base after building the first few buildings you see a bunch of 4 onos coming at you before you have any decent weapons
-they're targeted when taking down bases, going for phase gates and turret factories first
however, they still lack strategic thought, and sometimes build stupidly - on one map last night we had a base set up on a hive location, including turrets and siege cannons. one bot repeatedly saved up, went gorge, ran in and dropped the hive. of course, it got blasted by the defences. they seem pretty good and building things as they come across them, but seem to attack outwards from wherever they spawn in a rather random unorientated fashion. but hey, they're only bots, and they were pretty damn good, especially on combat maps
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I have done A LOT of waypointing for whichbots over time and everyone always says, "it's the waypoints that make the difference and your waypoints sandmansa, are what accent a great bot and make them shine".
That was an actual quote of what someone said to me once. Unfortunately, giving past experiance with past NS betas, I will not be waypointing any more beta released maps. Only final release products. Why you ask? Because the NS devs have a bad tendency to make alterations to some of the maps, all throughout many of their beta stages, and it's to much work to waypoint a map if it's only going to be played for a few months tops.
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I've done a fair bit of waypointing myself for different bots, and I am aware of the difference waypoints will make. There are also maps that are just generally more bot friendly than others, but if you get great waypoints on a bot friendly map, you will see a huge difference in how the bots play, and they will be much tougher to play against. I know how much work waypointing is as well, so thank you as well to all the waypointers that have helped make WhichBot what it is, including you sandmansa. :)
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From all of KustomKarnage I wanna thank [KcK]The Masked Carrot for the many hours of Karnage with his whichbot tweaking on our servers. Its been very entertaining at times.
Most of Carrots amxx plug-ins we use for controling bots on our 200+ waypointed maps are avalible on out site.Thanks from[KcK]Woody of www.kustomkarnage.com
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Is this bot version designed to run exclusively on NS 3.2? Because I'm getting some interesting things going on my 3.1.0 listenserver, and I don't see anyone complaining.
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I just tried wb 1.04 today on my ns 3.1.3 server. It was just 2 bots vs me and the bots never built a single thing. Instead, the gorge just ran around in the hive in a constant loop. Was it lost or just couldn't decide what to do next? So I went in and killed it, then it ran away to gorge somewhere else but still, never built anything. The totally confused gorge just kept getting stuck in a loop.
I did find a fade poking around and taking pot shots at my base and electric res but never ran away to heal. It just kept on trying to kill my res until it died. Was there something special in the new whichbot.txt over 1.02's version that would effect the bots like this in classic NS?
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Did you use your old whichbot.txt file? Did you do a clean install? I think you need to do a clean install and then manually modify the new whichbot.txt. There were changes in the whichbot.txt which I think are necessary for the bot to operate correctly. I didn't get a chance to see if the bots were building when I tested as I didn't get near a built hive, but from everything I heard on my server the bots were generally playing smarter and tougher, and I would think that would include building, although I must admit, they aren't building up the map anywhere close to the degree that I would like to see.
I would like to see gorges build defensive positions with 2 - 4 dc's and 6+ oc's, together with a movement chamber that they actually use, similar to the way FoxBot uses teleporters. I would like to see a similar thing happen in hives where the gorges drop a minimum of 4 dc's and 8 oc's and an mc. I would like to see res nodes built on and protected with 4+ oc's and at least 1 dc. In short I want to see a tough battle where the bots force the marines to build siege cannons, and fight their way through the map.
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I guess what I want to see is the bots be more intelligent and active strategically. Now it seems as though the bots are pretty smart tactically, and they play the fps element of NS quite well, but they don't take advantage of the strategy elements anywhere near as strongly as I would like them to. If that is going to happen now you need someone to switch to the aliens and play gorge for them.
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Well, just for the sake of arguement, I did a clean install of wb 1.04 and got identical results as before. The gorge is getting stuck in a loop and refuses to build anything. Just running back and forth or in a circle following the waypoint path. The skulks are doing okay. I see no real difference in their performance yet. The fades are tring to go only where lerks and skulks are suppose to be going but can't move because they don't know to crouch. Ladder usage has improved so that is a plus.
But anyway, without the gorges building, there really is no game from the bots. By the way, my server is a stand alone dedicated win32 ns 3.1.3 server in case that information is needed.
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http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=76903
Please let me know if the build is looking good (especially the linux build since I don't have a way to test it right now).
All significant changes in this build are courtesy of masked_carrot (thanks for all the hard work!).
* Tweaked weapon settings. Added charge and web.
* Improved cloak support.
* Added sanity check to shouldUseMelee, stop onos from stomping at jp and stop lerk from sporing heavy armor.
* Fixed bug in parsing hive update message.
* Tweaked movement to cope with charging, cloaking. Hopefully ladder movement is also improved.
* Don't bother listening to marines that are being eaten.
* Tweaked build plan slightly.
* Switched from hardcoded combat upgrades to getting them from config file.
* Fixed bug where builder (gorge) options weren't being read in from config file properly.
* Added config file option for onos in combat maps.
* Updated message handling and use slightly more sane method to detect map start.
* Changed kickLastBot so it kicks last bot added.
* Fixed memory leak.
* Fixed config impulse values for sof and focus.
I'll be running it as soon as I have it downloaded and configured. I'll post back as soon as I've spent a bit of time with it. :)
Ran it for an hour or so on Linux with no issues that I could see. Looks good! Thank you very much!
The one thing I'm not seeing is the configuration option for onos on combat maps. Am I just missing it?
onos is under the admin settings near the top aof the file
So it isn't an additional cvar, just the old one applies to both classic and combat maps now?
max_fraction_onos
That's the only onos cvar I can see.
ack!!!
Somehow I forgot to add that to cvs. my bad.
After 'max_fraction_onos' add:
#allow_combat_onos - Zero means none.
#Otherwise it's the minimum number of bots needed before considering onos.
allow_combat_onos=6.0
Thought there was something missing. Thanks much. :)
I think it would be a good idea for archiving purposes to include a zip of the source with each release, placed alongside the binary in the Sourceforge download page.
Just thought I'd post some feedback from one of my clan mates. This guy doesn't hand out praise easily, so focus on the positive stuff. All in all I'd say 1.04 is a great success and a big improvement, thanks for the work that went into it.
Modest Genius wrote:
well the bots were at lot nastier in four specific ways:
-they're a lot harder to kill (probably due to taking upgrades)
-they hide around corners and cloak
-they tend to all come rushing at the base at once (although this may just be due to spawning together). similarly, they tend to all save up for fade or onos together, so just as you're leaving your base after building the first few buildings you see a bunch of 4 onos coming at you before you have any decent weapons
-they're targeted when taking down bases, going for phase gates and turret factories first
however, they still lack strategic thought, and sometimes build stupidly - on one map last night we had a base set up on a hive location, including turrets and siege cannons. one bot repeatedly saved up, went gorge, ran in and dropped the hive. of course, it got blasted by the defences. they seem pretty good and building things as they come across them, but seem to attack outwards from wherever they spawn in a rather random unorientated fashion. but hey, they're only bots, and they were pretty damn good, especially on combat maps
I haven't done any waypointing for WhichBot, but I'm guessing that some of the criticism might apply to the waypoints, and not the bot coding itself.
I have done A LOT of waypointing for whichbots over time and everyone always says, "it's the waypoints that make the difference and your waypoints sandmansa, are what accent a great bot and make them shine".
That was an actual quote of what someone said to me once. Unfortunately, giving past experiance with past NS betas, I will not be waypointing any more beta released maps. Only final release products. Why you ask? Because the NS devs have a bad tendency to make alterations to some of the maps, all throughout many of their beta stages, and it's to much work to waypoint a map if it's only going to be played for a few months tops.
I've done a fair bit of waypointing myself for different bots, and I am aware of the difference waypoints will make. There are also maps that are just generally more bot friendly than others, but if you get great waypoints on a bot friendly map, you will see a huge difference in how the bots play, and they will be much tougher to play against. I know how much work waypointing is as well, so thank you as well to all the waypointers that have helped make WhichBot what it is, including you sandmansa. :)
From all of KustomKarnage I wanna thank [KcK]The Masked Carrot for the many hours of Karnage with his whichbot tweaking on our servers. Its been very entertaining at times.
Most of Carrots amxx plug-ins we use for controling bots on our 200+ waypointed maps are avalible on out site.Thanks from[KcK]Woody of www.kustomkarnage.com
Does the auto boost plugin work? I tested it out but I couldn't see anything on my listenserver to indicate it was working.
Those were out of date versions. Just uploaded the current versions, try it again.
Also note that the boost plugins don't currently work with ns3.2
Thanks again.
Is this bot version designed to run exclusively on NS 3.2? Because I'm getting some interesting things going on my 3.1.0 listenserver, and I don't see anyone complaining.
No,Almost all the testing I did was using a dedicated server running ns 3.1.3
what kind of things snappy? on 1.04, i'm not seeing any chambers being dropped besides rt's.
-zimzum
I just tried wb 1.04 today on my ns 3.1.3 server. It was just 2 bots vs me and the bots never built a single thing. Instead, the gorge just ran around in the hive in a constant loop. Was it lost or just couldn't decide what to do next? So I went in and killed it, then it ran away to gorge somewhere else but still, never built anything. The totally confused gorge just kept getting stuck in a loop.
I did find a fade poking around and taking pot shots at my base and electric res but never ran away to heal. It just kept on trying to kill my res until it died. Was there something special in the new whichbot.txt over 1.02's version that would effect the bots like this in classic NS?
Did you use your old whichbot.txt file? Did you do a clean install? I think you need to do a clean install and then manually modify the new whichbot.txt. There were changes in the whichbot.txt which I think are necessary for the bot to operate correctly. I didn't get a chance to see if the bots were building when I tested as I didn't get near a built hive, but from everything I heard on my server the bots were generally playing smarter and tougher, and I would think that would include building, although I must admit, they aren't building up the map anywhere close to the degree that I would like to see.
I would like to see gorges build defensive positions with 2 - 4 dc's and 6+ oc's, together with a movement chamber that they actually use, similar to the way FoxBot uses teleporters. I would like to see a similar thing happen in hives where the gorges drop a minimum of 4 dc's and 8 oc's and an mc. I would like to see res nodes built on and protected with 4+ oc's and at least 1 dc. In short I want to see a tough battle where the bots force the marines to build siege cannons, and fight their way through the map.
I guess what I want to see is the bots be more intelligent and active strategically. Now it seems as though the bots are pretty smart tactically, and they play the fps element of NS quite well, but they don't take advantage of the strategy elements anywhere near as strongly as I would like them to. If that is going to happen now you need someone to switch to the aliens and play gorge for them.
Well, just for the sake of arguement, I did a clean install of wb 1.04 and got identical results as before. The gorge is getting stuck in a loop and refuses to build anything. Just running back and forth or in a circle following the waypoint path. The skulks are doing okay. I see no real difference in their performance yet. The fades are tring to go only where lerks and skulks are suppose to be going but can't move because they don't know to crouch. Ladder usage has improved so that is a plus.
But anyway, without the gorges building, there really is no game from the bots. By the way, my server is a stand alone dedicated win32 ns 3.1.3 server in case that information is needed.
This is the same behavior that I am getting on my 3.1.0 listenserver. Gorging problems are resolved when I switch back to WB 1.03.
Also, running "wb status" shows the gorge status to be "WaypointNavigation" with no parens or value.