News
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6/5/99
I've been fairly busy for the past month finishing yet another semester and moving into my new apartment. However, recently I have been doing quite a bit of research on the Quake 3 file formats and other things. As long as Quake 3 is in it's testing phase, however, I don't plan to release anything, because I don't want to encourage any sort of cheating and the information will probably change soon anyways. Hopefully the climate will change in the future, though, and id will be more friendly to the client side bot community.

4/30/99
Woohoo! Q3Test has been released and it's looking great! I am busy decoding the BSP version 44 spec. I hope somebody out there is working on the network spec. I hope to have a Q3BotCore up and running as soon as possible.

3/4/99
Finally! The moment we've all been waiting for (trust me I've been looking forward to this moment I've just been too busy.) The full source to Q2BotCore and BastardBot has been released. I hope that my source helps other bot authors make bigger and better projects without having to worry about the nitty gritty stuff, and that authors that already use Q2BotCore can fix bugs that I just don't have time to fix. Anyways, it's all in one file on the Downloads page. Please read the README.

2/2/99
A lot of the e-mail I've been receiving recently has been about bug, desired features, and people requesting the source. I am currently planning a full source release of Q2BotCore, and maybe BastardBot too. I can't garauntee any timeframe; there's a lot to do and I have precious little free time recently. I hope that I can get it released some time this month though.

11/6/98
Sorry for the delay, but here's another release. I've been pretty busy but I really wanted to get this one out the door. It has quite a few improvements and also support for the LCC free Win32 compiler.

11/7/98
Oops! Looks like I screwed up the zip file when I uploaded it last night. It appears that I overwrote the .lib files for MSVC with the ones for LCC. If you had this problem, download again.

11/6/98
Sorry for the delay, but here's another release. I've been pretty busy but I really wanted to get this one out the door. It has quite a few improvements and also support for the LCC free Win32 compiler.

10/29/98
Hello again. I've been intending to make another release with some more enhancements, but I have had some problems recently. The authorities at my university wrongfully accused me of being involved in a hacking incident again some other universities around the world. The subsequent investigation has consumed much of my time and caused me great inconvienience. I am still working on the bot however, and I hope to do another release very soon. The problem is that I have finally located the cause of three of the most annoying bugs in Q2BotCore, but they will each take large amounts of time to fix. I may decide to release the next version before I can fix these bugs, just because the newest version is better than the last publicly released version, but I need to do normal release testing first.

10/23/98
I figured that I've been putting a lot of work into the Q2BotCore, but BastardBot wasn't getting any better. So today I sat down and rebuilt the event loop for BastardBot. BastardBot will no longer suck away your CPU cycles (unless it needs them), and it recovers from some bad situations a little better now. I'm not done with the improvements however, I have more planned.

10/22/98
Just posted version 0.95 of Q2BotCore. It contains yet more bug fixes and a bunch of new features. I haven't been able to test all the new features as much as I would have liked to, but everything seems to be in better shape. A lot of ideas for new features (and bug reports) come from you guys who download the library and try it out. I want to thank everyone (you know who you are) who helped with this release.

10/19/98
Just posted another version of Q2BotCore. It contains a bunch of bug fixes and stuff.

9/22/98
There is a new version of Q2BotCore. The only change is that it now supports Quake2 3.19. It only supports version 3.19 so don't download it if you're still using an older version.

9/7/98
I have rolled a bunch of changes into a new release of both Q2BotCore and BastardBot. I did a bunch of testing and things seem to be working fairly well. Enjoy.

9/4/98
Hi all. I am now back at college. This means that I will have much more free time :) I still have to worry about classes and a job, but I will spend as much time as I can to improve the Q2BoteCore.

I have been receiving a great deal of positive feedback from uses of Q2BotCore. I have a long list of features to add, and many of them have already been added. When everything gets in I will freeze the source and start testing for another release. Your suggestions are appreciated.

7/19/98
Things have really slowed down here. At least I'm off the release-a-day schedule. I would like to say my time has gone to some productive purpose, but I've spent a lot of time playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night recently.

I posted a new release of both Q2BotCore and BastardBot. The changes are slight, but they should fix problems related to older C compilers (read: anything other than MSVC5) and one problem related to the increase of MAX_ENTITIES between QW and Q2.

7/7/98
Man, now I've gotten myself on the release-a-day schedule...
There is a new release up that fixes the command line options under glbastard. New features will be incorporated after I can test them. You all can stop mailing me about the problem with map changes, I am aware of it and I will see what I can do about fixing it.

I have also had a request to provide the DLL's for OpenGL on this page. I don't know if it's legal or anything, but I'll put up the binaries from my hard drive with links to where you can download them.

7/6/98
Well, the version I released yesterday was missing a major feature (it didn't run unless you had Quake2 installed in d:/quake2/) Grimsta alerted me to this problem and I hope is it fixed in the new release. I also fixed map loading problems for maps with capital letters in them (Q2DM8).

7/5/98
I put up another demo on the download page. I wanted to mention that while this demo is over 6 minutes, each of the bots only consumed 6 seconds of CPU time on my machine (1.6 billion CPU cycles) which means that a single PII400 would have enought CPU power to run nearly 100 bots at once!

7/4/98
BastardBot has been released. Check it out here. I'll write more on this later.

Quake 3.17 has been released. Go out and get it if you haven't already because it fixes a lot of bugs and stuff.

I have upgraded Q2BotCore to support version 3.17 now. That means that it won't work with any previous version now, but 3.17 is supported on every platform Quake2 runs on, so it shouldn't be a problem :)

Go download the newest version of Q2BotCore from the download page. I had to make one more small API change to facilitate the new login sequence for 3.17. That means that bots written for the old version will need a slight change.

Oh, and happy July 4th, everyone!

7/1/98
Oops. The .zip file I uploaded last night didn't have a readme in it. That would make it very hard for someone without a PAK extractor to use. I just fixed that. Download it again if you had a problem.

6/30/98
I added .dm2 recording in the Q2BotCore. This not only means that bots based on Q2BotCore will be able to record demos, but it also means that I will be posting some demos of BastardBot in action soon.
Note to bot authors: recording a .dm2 files doesn't seem to be as simple as the old .dem/.qwd files. There are some subtle differences.

I just made really quick demo of BastardBot against me on one of my test maps. You can get it at the download page. Note that the bot does much better on a test map than a real map, because test maps are really small and simple.

6/28/98
I am now hosted at www.telefragged.com! BastardBot is working pretty good now, but on some maps it does really stupid things. Expect more stuff soon.

Just uploaded release 4. I'll try to keep 'em coming. Most of the changes are bug fixes but there are some small API changes.

6/26/98
Just uploaded release 3. I added some functions, and fixed more bugs internally. I need to find a way to be more organized about my webpage; when I move to telefragged.com, I will probably change the format some. By the way, BastardBot is just about rock-solid, I just want to add some more last minute features.

6/24/98
Just uploaded release 2. I don't even know if anyone is downloading this thing. If you use it, why don't you drop me a line and say hi. I'd like to know if there is any intrest in this project at all.

6/22/98
Although I have been having hardware trouble recently, I have make a great deal of improvements to the code. The internal code is significantly more robust, and there are added features that you probably won't ever see, but they just work better. At this point there are two things holding up the next release. In certain low-lag situations (i.e. testing on my local server) navigation gets stuck on corners. The obvious solution would be to increase the lag to the navigation engine, but I had a stroke of genius this morning. One of the features I had planned for the future for real-time missile avoidance can be used at load time to "fix" the waypoints near corners. I am experimenting with this now. The other thing that's holding me up is the 3.17 release. There is no point in supporting 3.15 now because it will be obsolete soon, but 3.17 isn't out yet, so there is no point in releasing a 3.17 compatible version yet. If 3.17 isn't released soon, I will put out another 3.14 compatible version, and then change it for 3.17, but for now, I am waiting.

6/11/98
I'm just making an update to notify people of the next release very soon. It won't be this week but probably next week. I have added a lot of things. First, .bsp loading is included, along with full visibility calculations and high level navigation. By high level navigation I mean calculating a path from one place to another place that you can neccesarily see. This is all very optimized, because the code was originally part of my JavaBot, thus written in Java and very slow. Other features include less bugs and more information available in the gamestate. I have begun porting BastardBot's AI over to run on top of Q2BotCore and I noticed a lot of functionality is lacking. I intend to expose as much information as possible about the gamestate, while keeping it easy to understand and use. The last change is a makeover of the function names, which was neccesary to prevent the linker from confusing my functions with other ones. All functions are now prefixed with the letters "qb" so a funtions like consoleCommand is new qbConsoleCommand. The functionality is the same however.

Last updated Saturday, 05-Jun-1999 02:04:39 CDT
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