What's the difference between bots and zdoom scripted marines?

[invictius]

Apparently not much attention has been paid to making "good" bots, so are scripted friendly marines about equal? Do they take up as much cpu power as bots?

[Coraline]

Depends - are you talking about deathmatch bots or cooperative bots? Scripting friendly monsters is one way to do it but will not roam around the level as efficiently (using nodepaths, I think, don't quote me, been awhile).

For instance, you can "script" a friendly monster in DDF, but it will not have the same capability that a Bot in DDF will have, since the Bot has its own separate code and is generally "smarter" at navigating on its own, versus a monster that uses the same code to patrol around.

Bots are also capable of picking up items, counting frags in multiplayer, navigate levels on their own, and can operate switches/lifts/doors/etc, among other stuff. Though, they are complicated to code for, which is why I imagine most people just script friendly monsters. Could be wrong though, I'm mostly talking in context to 3DGE/DOSDoom here and not modern ports like Zandronum which I'm sure has bots...I think the Cajun bot?

Too bad that code was never released though.

More reference material here

[Gez]

The biggest difference is that, as far as the engine is concerned, bots are players (AI-controlled, sure, but players) while scripted marines are merely friendly monsters.

Skulltag, and therefore Zandronum, use their own bot code instead of the ZCajun bots found in ZDoom and GZDoom.

[Coraline]

Gez said:

Skulltag, and therefore Zandronum, use their own bot code instead of the ZCajun bots found in ZDoom and GZDoom.

Just curious, was it created from scratch for Skulltag or based on an existing bot "library"?

For instance, 3DGE too has bot support, but it's been heavily modified through previous years from the old DeathBot inherited from DOSDoom. Equally cool that Zdoom still supports modified CajunBot code.

I still remember how big of a deal it was to have bots in the early days of source ports...(◕‿◕✿)ლ

[Gez]

Chu said:

Just curious, was it created from scratch for Skulltag or based on an existing bot "library"?

IIRC they were a from scratch implementation by Carnevil, not based on Cajun. ZDoom's own bots are absent from Skulltag/Zandronum.

[invictius]

Chu said:
Bots are also capable of picking up items, counting frags in multiplayer, navigate levels on their own, and can operate switches/lifts/doors/etc, among other stuff. Though, they are complicated to code for, which is why I imagine most people just script friendly monsters. Could be wrong though, I'm mostly talking in context to 3DGE/DOSDoom here and not modern ports like Zandronum which I'm sure has bots...I think the Cajun bot?More reference material here [/B]

I tried 3dge bots on a map (TNT map 31) and they never changed weapons and never threw switches. For a minute there I thought they'd be more intelligent than zandronum ones.