September 26, 1999

After debuting at Urban, the CGF bots are now ready for a sequel: Urban2 (also by Gerbil!). A new opportunity to test your skills on a mission to eliminate Sabotage, this time in an even darker environment (check out how the trusty ol' Super90 shotgun feels more at home here).
Also included some more TP like survival missions (where you play in terror outfit - the bots are too hard to spot when in terror).

Get the Urban2 CGF pack and be the hero in this sequel...

Note that in this CGF beta, the bots see a bit better than you in the dark¹. This is about to change.

I also experimented a bit with 'platoon level' urban combat. Running an engagement of two platoons, some 70+ bots in total, on a dedicated server worked out fine. However, the resulting demo proved hard to handle for Q2 (too much network traffic?). Above, you'll see some shots from late in the battle (after 20+ casualties, and without corpes - they disappeared).

William

September 18, 1999

The CGF bots have been sent back to school. To compensate for upcoming a reduction in vision¹, they are attending an advanced course on tactical terrain understanding. And they are doing fine...

In terms of game play (real documentation here for visitors interested in AI or CGF's design) this means:

• given an AQ2 map and a route file for that map, the bots will know within five minutes of CGF number crunching where to find the tactically significant locations of that map (even for your home-made maps).

  These locations will then be taken into account when bots snipe, position themselves, select threats to engage, etc.

For example, take Gerbil!'s Urban: TP combat typically is dominated from the roof ledges, the two sniper rooms, the AQ2 sign location, the ladder camp spot, and the positions between the air vents.
Now have a look at the graphs illustrating the CGF understanding of this map below (lighter colors represent tactically better locations, and blue areas represent unreachable areas):

The center graph shows the tactical value of locations at street level and in/at medium height buildings. Here, the brightest spots coincide with the AQ2 sign (top left), lower sniper room (bottom left), and lower four-air-vent-roof sniper position. An easy to recognize weak location is the single door in the center building.

The right side graph shows the tactical value of rooftop locations. CGF considers the following locations very valuable: ladder camp spot (right), higher sniper room (right), the sniper position closest to the Coke sign (bottom right). Not too bad for a bot :).

There's also (more) good news for the crack AQ2 players that know a few more key locations at Urban: by recording and analyzing player and bot performance, CGF 0.80 will try to improve its terrain understanding even further. In other words, you'll be training your own killers... (More details on that in a future update).

While I'm working on these CGF 0.80 features, you'll have to do with CGF 0.78 for a few more weeks. The coming week I'll make a route + mission pack available for Urban2. Meanwhile, a few guys (Floppier, Dave Prentis, Lennon, and Ryan McAleese) are doing a great job at creating route files for CGF 0.80.

On the topic of route files: RiEveR (of the LTK AQ2 bot) and I are exchanging some info and code so LTK can benefit from the CGF route files (becoming) available (but CGF won't be able to use LTK files since CGF is a bit peculiar about way points - mainly because it wants to do the analysis described above).

Oops - I screwed up the upload of the CGF Launcher 1.50 documentation. This has been fixed.

William

¹ : Wrt vision reduction. CGF employs a very detailed vision model, taking into account fog, distance, light level, whether the target moves, how much of the target is visible, whether the bot was already tracking the target, etc. All of this results in single score. The sole problem is that none of the bots currently have a 'minimum visibility' threshold: no matter how low the visibility score of a threat, they will see him.
Of course, this needs to change, and will enable for more variety in tactics against the bots: for example, sneaking through dark areas will be beneficial.

And yes, in the screen shots above (recorded at p1_lightbeam) I've tricked the projected slides. Me and the bots are for real though.

September 13, 1999

A new version of Ross 'JoeSatch' Norton's CGF Launcher has arrived, eliminating the need to download patches for patches. CGF Launcher 1.50 has fixed almost every launch problem reported, and even includes an experimental feature to export your weapon preferences into multiple missions (do make sure these missions are related, otherwise you'll screw things up).

If you're a frequent user of the CGF Launcher, you can download version 1.50. In other cases, you are stongly advised to download the documentation, and, if needed, the Visual Basic run-times as well.

On the topic of launching bots, Maxtron (PlanetQuake's bot site) announced the birth of a 'standard' AQ2 bot, based on Steve Yeager's ACE bot. (If I remember correctly, the ACE bot is able to learn a map while it plays it).

Created over the weekend by RiEvEr, the young bot is called 'Licensed To Kill' or LTK and understands DM and TP. It is still in 'alpha', and should not be mirrored since RiEvEr is very busy with it. Get it from Maxtron (but back up your CGF gamex86.dll before you use LTK).

William

September 9, 1999

The Monastery: a peculiar Action map, providing us with an adventurous deserted temple. As of today, CGF bots will visit these ruins and they won't behave that nice. Download the Monastery CGF pack now, and see for yourself what happens!.

Monastery, by KongFoo is one of the oldest AQ2 maps, and part of the first map pack released for action. If you don't already have it on your hard disk, get it from AQMD.

In the included missions, you are simply Rambo. With at most one buddy (wearing the same cool 'designer jeans'), you need to try to survive amidst a cast of violent movie characters.

I apologize for teasing you with screen shots featuring a touch of fog, but the fog also needs testing :). Though fog won't be available until the upcoming CGF 0.80 version (later this month), I've completed most of the work on supporting fog in the AI, and I've made available the documentation for using fog here.
If you happen to know which graphic chip set (drivers) support OpenGL1.1 and which don't, please send me a mail, so I can add that to the documentation.

The coming week, I'll show you why the new CGF version is taking this long. You'll get to know more about what goes on in a bot brain and how it affects you.

Keep the Action going!

William

September 1, 1999

CGF bonus feature: fog! For those among you featuring a graphics accelerator supporting OpenGL1.1 (most recent boards, but not the 3DFX Voodoo series), CGF 0.80 will provide the option of fighting under foggy conditions.

Just like breakable glass, fog is optional and defaults to 'off'. In addition, fog density and colors can be configured per map - presets for well known maps will be included as well.

Adding fog is not very original¹ but it will definitely enhance CGF replayability.

The screen shots 'clearly' illustrate how fog affects gameplay. Fog changes the map's atmosphere, and forces you to adjust your tactics even for those 'well known' missions.

Of course, the CGF AI will understand fog:

• bot vision will be affected by fog density (it is being overhauled anyway)
• bots will understand the 'cover' effect of fog, and use it to hide or approach you stealthily

A few warnings apply: fog eats frame rate, all but the lowest fog densities show artifacts, and fog just doesn't feel right for a number maps (most of them indoor maps :) ).

Incubus One has released a few patches for the Borderfield CGF Mission Editor, that fix tiny but annoying bugs in the powerful mission creation tool.

The Navy SEALs (for Quake1) site seems to be 'missing in action'. Because I occasionally receive questions about NS1 and the (very limited) sQuad bots, I've uploaded a .zip archive containing the NS1 version 2.x, fixed for use with GLQuake and including bots (for e1m1 only).
If you want to inspect Gooseman's early work (before Action and CounterStrike) or like to use the M60, the M4/M203, or real silencer equipped MP5's go get it here [8MB].

Last thing: the new 'coverme' map (Cover Me by Sir Francis) probably is the map featuring the largest number of breakable windows today: close to 10 windows, fitting the map's theme. Test and review it at AQMD.

William
¹: I had completely forgotten about fog until I visited the new AQ mod site 'AQ2: Infiltration'. They deserve credit to be the first (AFAIK) to try to add fog to AQ2.
One HotBot search and 20 minutes later, CGF featured 'fog' as well.
The fog trick was developed by Rohan, coder of 'Revenge of the Stroggos' (ROS) and Navy SEALs 2, in June 98. At that time, we had some discussions about the fog (and about CGF for NS2), but I had a 3dfx Voodoo and wasn't able to try it.
I've used the Inside3D tutorial by Roscoe 'legion' Sincero as a base to add it to CGF.

Old News

• August 99 ['downtown', 'actcity2' packs]
• July 99 [0.77 - 0.78 beta]
• May - June 99
• March - April 99