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a Half-Life engine AI |
| Version: | 0.3 (beta) |
| Date: | 01/23/05 |
| Mods: | HLDM |
| Crabbed | |
| S&I |
| About |
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Grave Bot was a small projected started in the summer of 2004 by me, Caleb 'Ghoul' Delnay. I started Grave Bot for a few different reasons. Read on!
Also during the summer of 2004 I worked on a mini-mod entitled Crabbed. Crabbed was a small modification to Half-Life Deathmatch where the goal was not mainly to kill other players, but to kill the headcrabs randomly spawned throughout the level. It was never meant to be a successful mod, just something to occupy myself with in my spare time, and provide a few laughs with my fellow IRC junkies when we felt like some Half-Life Multiplayer hilarity. The problem however, was that Crabbed seemed to work best with a fairly high number of people playing. Not everybody in IRC was always available, so I took it upon myself to modify botman's HPB bot to run around my Crabbed mod and frag headcrabs. For a few weeks I slaved away for hours at night, usually staying up until 7 or 8 AM programming. While the HPB Bot has always been a classic and favorite, I felt it was lacking in several important features. So, eventually I turned out what was then labeled as "Crabbed Bot". It didn't take long to get a decently advanced bot running around. It was at this point that I realized HLDM had a distinct lack of spectatular bots. The two popular choices were The Jumbot and HPB Bot. At this same time, still in the summer of 2004, my IRC friends and I downloaded the release of Science and Industry 1.0. I had played S&I long ago in the past, I believe one of the 0.97 versions, but I fell in love with this final release. It was quickly realized that S&I had no bots for it. With only a few servers of the mod active at any given time, having large chaotically fun games presented a challenge. Obviously the idea struck me to get the still labeled "Crabbed Bot" into Science and Industry, seeing as I already had a very capable HLDM bot in my hands. I began working feverishly again, programming all night, in my attempt to get some results. If I remember correctly, I believe it only took me a single night to get from S&I instantly crashing upon loading the hooker DLL to bots joining random teams and wandering around. From then on it was just the programming of additional features and tweaks to fix bugs. I shot off an e-mail to the current S&I programmer in hopes of receiving some information about some of internal workings of Science and Industry (it had some 30 new network messages, many just numbers, for you other programmers out there, this = frustration!), and thankfully received a very helpful reply a few days later. Eventually the name "Crabbed Bot" was painfully incorrect and I had to think of another name. I wanted it to be something unique, and not an acronym, something simple and easy to remember. Something that would stick, hopefully. I finally settled on the word "Grave". It's a strong word with meaning, several meanings in fact that I feel apply to the bot. Main Entry: grave Pronunciation: 'grAv, in sense 5 often 'gräv Function: adjective Inflected Form(s): grav·er; grav·est Etymology: Middle French, from Latin gravis heavy, grave -- more at GRIEVE 1 a obsolete : AUTHORITATIVE, WEIGHTY b : meriting serious consideration : IMPORTANT <grave problems> c : likely to produce great harm or danger <a grave mistake> d : significantly serious : CONSIDERABLE, GREAT <grave importance> (source: Merriam-Webster OnLine) As you can probably guess, the sections of that defination I noticed were b and c. You better believe I'm serious about this bot kicking your ass! :D I think that about wraps up what I want to talk about here. To find information about what the bot is capable of, just navigate on over to the Bots section. If for some reason you care about me (haha), I have my own domain here. |