[MUD-Dev] FEAR Animat style AI for Quake 2

[adam]

on Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 09:18:55AM -0600, shren wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, Frank Crowell wrote:
>> From: "shren" <shren at io.com>
>>> On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, Freeman, Jeff wrote:
>>>> From Ted L. Chen
 
>> Actually this is an issue that is rarely considered and could
>> very well ruin the notion of "game".  In the FPS community the
>> bots are much disliked.  The assumption is that the bots cheat
>> and therefore shouldn't be allowed.
  
>> I have posted several times on the theme that bots are disliked
>> by the admins and most players.  The only ones that seem to like
>> bots are the botmakers.  Even MUDs quickly made the environments
>> hostile to bots and almost every mud today still has the
>> restrictions against cyborgs and bots.  The smart bots were
>> kicked out and the dumb bots got to stay taking in-server jobs as
>> mobs and NPCs.

> Well, humans don't like to compete with smart bots, and there's
> good reason.  A bot doesn't have to contend with lag, can aim
> merely by wanting to, and never, ever backs down.  Add to that
> that most people in muds try to use bots to get ahead.
 
> I noted that the new version of Unreal has very smart bots, and
> very smart bot designers - because the bots are designed to play
> second string roles.  The bots can pad out a game to make it of
> decent size but they don't take over the game.  Bots, like the
> brooms in the Magician's Apprentice, are more than capable of
> taking over a game.

Speaking as someone who used to play FPS's an awful lot (although
not any more; to keep in practice required many hours a day, and I
certainly haven't had free time liek that for years), the Unreal
Tournament bots were extrmeely popular amongst the other hardcore
FPS'ers I used to play with. Personally, I really liked Q3 (I was
better at it than at UT :), but spent most of two years playing UT
instead - because the Q3 bots acted like "bots", whereas UT bots
acted like "humans".

I can honestly say that we would have had no fun competing with
"dumb" bots, and even when we were being whipped by the top UT bots,
still enjoyed it. But playing against Q3 top bots was no fun at all
- every shot was pixel and millisecond perfect, they never made a
single mistake, and the only way to beat them was to find the
glaring hoels in their simplistic strategies, and then you could
start getting some serious revenge. It became like a macro: lead
them into the same looping behaviour,, getting one more frag each
time (or in some cases, getting two more frags and letting them get
one on you in the process - as long as you were keeping ahead :).

UT bots on the other hand seemed to never be 100% accurate - it felt
like you were competing on tactics against opponents who were
suitably skilled (i.e. their aiming was NEARLY always spot on) that
the game was about more than merely "whose reaction times are 10ms
faster than everyone elses".

Perhaps this perspective came from the fact that we knew we ranked
in the top 1% or so of players, and could tell when an opponents
reactions and aiming were so good that they were probably better
than *every* human on the planet.  That's no fun. Personally I got
really fed up that it seemed the Quake developers had given up on
producing an AI sufficiently clever to provide a challeng for good
human players, and so resorted to just making sure their bots had
innate skill (aiming accuracy, reaction times etc) that were so much
better than every human player that they didn't *need* good AI to
win.

This may not be true, nor fair to eitehr game ( I haven't seen the
AI code and algorithms for either game :), but if it is, then I can
only say that the Q3 approach sucks.

I certinly wasnt the best amongst those I played with, so I'll try
and solicit opinions from some others who were better than me and
see if they still agree.

Adam M


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