saik
mr.nobody
posts : 242
| bots are every bit as much a part of quake as lag, air rockets, spawn rape and excuses. the only way to play when you've no human opponents, or play without lag when human opponents are analling you spawn rape stylee because of your connect. there's been loads of good bots down through the years. everytime somebody goes and does something new with bots it's really impressive for some reason. the new bot usually goes and beats you around till you find its flaws, and then you can't believe how badly you were getting bet. they all had incremental skill levels so you could work up to beating the top one, which was great.
first i saw were reaperbots for quake, then for me the next big jump was the q2 eraser bots, which could learn how to play maps and do jumps. the gladiator bots for quake2 could do rocket jumps, had unbelievable aim. i didn't play qw and so missed frogbots. quake3 came with the gladiator bots built in, with some gimmicks. xaero was a cunt. all of these bots had the beatings of me for a time. inevitably, you got better than the bots, so the fun came from competitions. either personal bests, or against others to get high scores. for example, in quake1 i think there was a challenge against 12 reaperbots for 10 minutes on dm4 ffa (quad on) to get the highest score possible, some guy got 443! then in quake2 there was a competition versus four gladiator bots on q2dm8, unr-tazan got 160 or something. in q3 there was the quadnation ztn one which was also good. and dardoz fragged anarki 101 times in 15 minutes on pro6 without dying.
but they are all piss easy to beat now, basically because even vin has better movement than them. i was hoping for ages that somebody would do something about it. spiterbot came out and really impressed, but it was blatantly cheating and the graphics were all screwed around, so i didn't like it. if only they'd go put decent bots into osp i thought. osp seems pretty dead in the water tho, the team brought it up to a point, got bored and went off to do something else so, no deal, no bots. i'm really jealous of cpma, with all the cool stuff mvd etc it has over osp. it has people actually developing it and fixing it. jealous to the point that i went to try and play it, but it just does not suit at all. it might have, but quake3, particularly tdm, turned me into some weird kind of hitscan mutant.
cpma got new bots, with the help of the spiter bot guy. to get a quake fix, no connect, i tried them and they're really impressive, the 1.22 bots are amazing, despite the cpma effect. they even have their own map, cpm3a to show them off. you just do \addbot rat 100 and then watch as you get smeared around by this insanely fast evil little rat. this has happened to me before, and eventually i got around to beating the bot, but this time i'm very doubtful. it half has the cheat spiterbot movement and has ogc aim, but then i'm sure cpma players behave in an equally difficult manner. so this is what i will be doing when i am in gaming mood from now on.
did i say it was a bastard? i've had to change my sens from 3.3 way up to 6 or something to even hit a rail on it. somebody went and taught it basic tactics and what weapons to use in what situations. all you can do is sit back and watch while it pulls some mad plasma, mid air rocket x2!! to exactly 33 health and then rail combo, dead, spawns you on a grenade, skipping around at 900 miles an hour dodging everything you've thrown at it, running the armours and the mega. all this at skill 81. which is about the same as its rail accuracy. magnificent, a joy to behold, and what's even nicer is the idea that the bot is just more code on top of the quake2 gladiator bots i was slapping around years ago.
but, and there's a few of them; it's in cpma and the skill level isn't really incremental. i'll leave slagging off cpma till later. basically, to go about beating bots, you add 1 skill level and play it till you beat it, then go up one level. simple enough. so i'm able to beat the bots up to level 80 easily enough. but at level 81, the bot gets an awful lot better. some people argue that's the way skill levels work in quake but i think it's more subtle than that. the best i've done is to keep level for five minutes, getting every item, and then after i fuck up keeping his lead under 15. compared to me 20 - 0'ing the 80 skill bot, purely by robbing all the items, this is a big skill jump. most time's it's 25+ - -ve score for him, even tho you've hit 40 shaft, 55 rail and hit 3 mid air rockets. fuck that! it would be much less frustrating if the bot would get gradually better as you went up.
cpma is completely alien to me. reading the manual, it's like the arqon is from another planet. he's gone and changed around all the guns, to make rail, rocket launcher and plasma the best guns. lg is completely shite, apparently because it is a noskill lpb weapon, unlike plasma. yeah. it makes little or no sense to me. the game basically feels like quake3 used to in a smaller map. you move way faster and cover more ground, using only rl and rail. because the players move so fast plasma is quite pointless unless you are right beside them, can't imagine a high skill hpb making use of it. what would be cool, is that if a direct unbounced grenade did 150 damage or something, i think that's more skillful than a direct rocket. another thing about cpma is that the weapons might get changed around completely because it's a new game in development or something, which would be very annoying.
cpm3a doesn't seem suited to cpma as a map. the older quake3 maps, t4 dm13 dm7 and old q3dm6 are all much fun than cpm3a as maps to play on. kind of funny really, as the lg only really became a weapon by the time the maps got changed to dm14, pro6 etc to make quake3 better. you need to download all the maps to play cpma, which is a real pain. especially if all you want to do is play the bot on baseq3 maps because you have a 16.6k modem. cpma has you doing the exact opposite to what q3 says you should, jumping in fights etc, running towards the armour rather than nailing the other guy. the weirdness makes it less enjoyable.
it's without doubt the best thing to play without a connect, definately, amazing ai. but i'd be way happier playing the bot with a true incremental skill in osp quake3. and a bot this good should really be able to plasma climb to rl on cpm3a, instead of dying in the lava the whole time. anyone who can post a demo of them beating the 100 skill rat bot with bot_challenge 1 deserves a prize.
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