How do I make the offline bots smarter?

Discuss all aspects related to modding Zandronum here.
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Mitchandagun
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How do I make the offline bots smarter?

#1

Post by Mitchandagun » Fri Mar 21, 2025 11:55 pm

I'm looking for both mods and what to set the "botskill" setting to. That's about it

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Sean
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Re: How do I make the offline bots smarter?

#2

Post by Sean » Sat Mar 22, 2025 10:26 am

Crank botskill up to 4 and maybe check out TDBots
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Ænima
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Re: How do I make the offline bots smarter?

#3

Post by Ænima » Sat Mar 22, 2025 11:33 pm

IIRC the botscript has remained unchanged since the Skulltag days. From what I seem to remember, Carnevil was the last person to have the source and nobody has been able to decompile it since then, so the bots will probably remain the way they are forever.
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TDRR
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Re: How do I make the offline bots smarter?

#4

Post by TDRR » Sun Mar 23, 2025 7:58 pm

We've had a custom BotScript compiler for years by now, and the bot lumps have been decompiled for years as well. The TDBots make use of that to give ACS the ability to press buttons and do other actions using the native bot interface.

The actual issue is that the bot system is archaic and only built for (team) deathmatch. Hacking it to support PvE modes and other more complex PvP modes would be a massive amount of work, to the point it'd just be best to rip the whole thing out and start from scratch. The actual scripting language itself is pretty terrible and can't really do much of anything on it's own too, IMO it isn't worth keeping around or replacing with something similar.
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