December 25, 1999

Ho ho ho ho. Santa Claus brings us CGF 0.81 with bug-fixes, CGF multi-player test-code and support for RiotX.

The bugs that have been fixed include:

• appearance of blue/green balls and male/reservoir models ('men in black')
• fixed echo-ing of 'enemyd' and 'enemys' sounds when issued by player
• fixed picking up of 'old school' cannon (weapon wasn't selected after picking up)
• fixed VWEP representation when bot switches weapon
• terrain computations are post-poned until mission start, so a warning now can appear on-screen
• close-combat bot behavior has been made more aggressive
• movement tweaks to deal with low portals preceded by <8 unit thresholds (urban2 and all windows at riotx)
• player name substitutions now work; mission objectives can refer to the mission name of the player whereas the player keeps his name

In addition, CGF 0.81 contains test code for multi-player CGF. Since I solely have a single PC at my disposal, thoroughly testing multi-player code is tough for me (see image above). In other words, I'm solliciting feedback from you.
You can find the info on how to run CGF in multi-player mode here.

To add an X-mass touch to this release, and more importantly, to enable CGF to visit one of the best AQ2 maps ever, RiotX "Jingle Balls Special" by Ellusion is now supported. RiotX may initially look like a snow covered Riot: Gangbang conversion, but you'll soon discover that this map extends Riot with an impressive amount of (demanding) jumps and new routes, a gloomy atmosphere, and a musical touch. Get it here.

The two series of RiotX missions have been designed with CGF (co-op) multi-player in mind (they also work fine as single-player missions, but may be a bit challenging).

My plans for CGF now include:

• improving bot movement so the bots can deal with natural terrain as in the jungle and cliff maps
• tackle button operated doors
• retro-fitting a number of AQ2 1.52 features
• experiments with 'func_train' vehicles (not sure if this results in something useful)

Enjoy your holidays!

William

December 3, 1999

[For the visitors new to CGF, look here for a description of CGF 0.80, and downloads].

More news about CGF 0.80: AI training, how to use fog on a 3dfx, a few bugs, and work on multi-player CGF.

AI Training
A quote from an email I received explains this best:

[CGF] is just plain fun to play it, I played the [p1_lightbeam] map mission for about 136 missions. Because I knew all the bot positions, I was bored.
Then I saw the AI training button on the corner, I clicked it and when I played, to my surprise THEY WERE ACTUALLY KILLING ME!
I went up, as I usually did to the ceiling, but the two bastards I killed weren't there. The first one was in the water waiting to kill me, and before I knew it he did.
Then after another try I got rid of him and when I went up the second one on the ceiling wasn't there, and to my surprise the bot was in that little vent waiting for someone to come look for him and got me right in the head!

With CGF 0.80, a 'AI Training' button (see image above) in the CGF Launcher is unlocked. Via this button, you can have CGF update its tactical understanding of the map.
The CGF bots will take into account their combat experience (this location is a killzone, that location was used for camping, etc.) and re-evaluate all positions. Positions that, for example, overlook kill zones will now be ranked higher. With their new understanding of the map's strong and weak positions, the bots will adapt some of their tactics.

Don't expect every 'AI training' to always have as big an impact as described above. It's a novel feature, to CGF (and to the tactical shooters in general :) ). We'll have to experiment a bit to get it really good; I'd like to see your feedback.

Fog on 3dfx voodoo
The trick provided in the previous news update doesn't seem to work, but I received a good number of emails with a trick that apparently works:

1. get the opengl32.dll intended for glquake (Quake1);
   it's here at FilePlanet.
2. copy the opengl32.dll into your quake2 (root) dir
3. launch Quake2, in the video menu, set the mode to 'default opengl'
4. make sure you've set fog to 1 (see here)
5. quit and launch CGF

"Men In Black" bug
CGF 0.80 sometimes presents you with a silent non-solid row of 'men in black', surrounded by green and blue balls [see image above]. It's a leftover from a session to debug formation placement, and I forgot to remove it.
It looks like a pretty innocent bug; however, these 'men in black' and more particular the balls consume a lot of entities; I suspect this bug to cause some crashes in the 'coverme' missions. The bug will be fixed in the next release (see below).

Another small bug: The old-style cannon incorrectly consumes ammo of the last used weapon.

CGF co-op multiplayer
In addition to answering lots of emails and fixing the above mentioned bugs, I started working on co-op multiplayer. This should enable LAN-users to co-operatively play against the bots. Don't expect CGF to become as stable a multi-player internet game as AQ2 1.52 (which requires little attention from the server operator); CGF is way too complex to contain so few bugs.
However, co-op multiplayer CGF will do fine as a supervised 'listen' or 'dedicated' server on a LAN.

In about two weeks, I intend to release CGF 0.81, fixing the above mentioned bugs, and containing test code for multi-player CGF (I do have some troubles testing multi-player thoroughly on just a single PC).

William

December 1, 1999

The new CGF 0.80 version seems to be about as solid as I intended it to be. It breezes a bit of new live into the existing missions (the AI fights different from the previous releases, and hiding in the dark can be quite effective). The new missions are well received.

Most questions deal with the availability of a few maps (see below), 'Quake2 not responding when launching CGF for the first time' (allow it a few minutes, see here), and fog for the 3dfx graphics accellerators.

The maps 'riot' and 'coverme' are not as easy to find as the others (though clicking on the images at the downloads page would have sent you straight to the right web site). Just to be sure, here they are again:

• Riot: Gangbang (by Ellusion), 1.4MB
• Cover Me (by Sir Francis), 1.5MB

With respect to seeing fog on a 3dfx card: I'm unable to test that myself (TNT here). I know for sure fog doesn't work on the older 3dfx drivers (appearing as '3dfx opengl' in the Quake2 menu), but 3dfx recently released new reference drivers implementing the full OpenGL 1.1 (or so they say).
[incorrect advice on getting fog to work on 3dfx boards removed]

Finally: the new weapons. Yes, 11MB isn't a very small download, but the weapons have been split over three archives of less than 6MB each. And, as can be seen in the screen shots above, they look (and sound) great.

William

November 28, 1999

After a lengthy period of training, here is CGF 0.80. Bringing better tactics, new map support, extra weapons, documentation, and above all... more action!

I personally am fond of the new missions:

• assaulting a well defended building at Riot (see left image above)
• defending the L-Mart at Coverme (where about 5 windows get broken in the first 30 seconds)
• infiltrating and clearing the p1_lightbeam lighthouse complex

The new supply of weapons (and weapon sounds) adds to the chaos of squad-on-squad engagements.

You can read all about the CGF 0.80 features both here and in the release notes.

Please read the download and release instructions carefully. And beware of the 5 minute number crunching preceding the first missions on a new map (CGF seems to hang but instead is working hard for you).

William

November 17, 1999

Writing documentation, new missions and polishing the code... Almost there... Instead of telling you how the CGF bots are doing, have a look at a new animation (displaying fast paced entry and overwatch):

I also like to thank both the Terror Quake2 team and the Navy Fortress team for their support in enabling CGF to host a dozen additional (optional) weapons (including VWEPs).

William

November 7, 1999

Lots of news: a novel feature: adaptive tactics, the upcoming release is coming along well, and bits and pieces about additional weapons for CGF.

Adapting tactics to combat patterns
From the upcoming CGF version 0.80 onwards, the CGF bots won't ever be the same again! Just like the better tactical gamers, these bots, with every fight, will get a better feel for the map's high traffic areas, the kill zones, the camp spots, the bottlenecks, and the successful sniper locations. They will build up combat experience...
And, more importantly, they will use that experience to improve and adapt their tactics.

CGF 0.80 will monitor the actions that humans and bots perform. For each map, during every mission, CGF collects data. And slowly but surely, patterns will emerge, allowing the bots, for example, to:

• keep a better eye on high traffic areas when sniping
• avoid known kill-zones when patrolling

This experience can also be integrated into the CGF static terrain analysis. CGF performs this analysis for new maps to a get good first impression of the tactical value of map locations. The experience gained by the bots will provide valuable information to adjust and improve this impression.
The CGF Launcher (by Ross 'JoeSatch' Norton) will inform you when it's time to do so (when confronted with CGF 0.80 terrain files, the CGF Launcher will unlock the 'Learn' feature).

The center graph above shows the kill zones among the roof level locations at Urban (blue areas are unaccessible at that height). In their fights the bots experienced the largest numbers of kills and damage at the ladder to the high roof (top right), the small planks leading towards the high roof (center right), next to the Coke sign (bottom center), as well as in the open street area near the AQ2 sign (top left).
The graph to the right shows 'early contact bottlenecks' at street and lower roof level. The red and orange locations typically host bots during the initial contact. The bots learned the bottlenecks near corners of the buildings (left side), the sniper room (center bottom), and the ladder to the lower rooftop (right).

This 'tactical learning' is pretty unique (few tactical shooters, if any, analyze traffic and terrain to provide you with adaptive tactics), but experimental as well (for the same reason). I guarantee that the bots adapt their tactics based on your and their performance (they react a bit stronger to your performance than to theirs since you're still the smartest fighter), but I cannot guarantee that the bots will counter all your tricks, or rank up more kills. But you might be training your own killers...

Note that experience files created by CGF cannot be 'reverse engineered' to extract particular tactics performed by a particular player: the player activity is stored anonymously and mixed with bot activities. Your privacy is guaranteed :)

And for the AI fans: adding a learning ability isn't a magic solution. A learning mechanism is solely capable of grasping an idea if programmer already has a good hunch for that idea, and provides it with the correct inputs and an evaluation function (not that easy in a CGF mission context).
Even then, it can solely provide limited improvements. Do not expect a 'learning AI' to come up with some cool looking bounding overwatch advance (unless it is capable of watching the 'The Rock' (the movie) a couple of times, write code for a week, and do performance tuning as well - that's the way I did it). (See the NeuralBot for more info on what a "100% learning bot" can do).

Upcoming release
The upcoming release is coming along nicely. There's still a bit of tuning and testing to be done. I need to work on the new route files, documentation and this web site as well. But in about a week, you'll get to experience it!
By now, the 120KB animation at the top of this page should have loaded, and show you a glimpse of the improved spread out during engagements.

Additional weapons
The Terror Quake2 team are pretty hesitant in allowing me to distribute a subset of their weapons with CGF. I understand that - the weapons are their creations, and I'm not giving much of CGF away either.
Instead, I'll prepare CGF to work with a few of their weapons, and include instructions of how to install a few TQ2 weapons with CGF. The sole problem, however, is that TQ2 isn't available in smaller lumps than a 30MB full install. I've offered TQ2 to provide them with the exact 3.5MB zip file required for CGF, but have yet to receive an answer. It might help if you also make a polite request (they have a forum at their site).
Meanwhile, MP*Canus and Lennon have been very helpful in creating VWEP animations, enabling the Q2 male to hold an AK47 as well.

William

p.s. RiEvEr, at his LTK site (the other bot for AQ2) incorrectly credits me for writing fog code: I didn't write any really new fog code, but instead figured out how to load specific fog settings for each map, and how much concealment the different types of fog provide (for use in the AI). See the fog info for the real credits.

Old News

• October 99 [AI info]
• September 99 ['monastery', 'urban2' packs]
• August 99 ['downtown', 'actcity2' packs]
• July 99 [0.77 - 0.78 beta]
• May - June 99
• March - April 99