Spoon bots

[perrinoia]

On dangerous crossing, there is a necromancer that spawns behind the enemy bounce, quite far out of the mission area boundaries. It hovers in the air, bouncing up and down, making it nearly impossible to hit, and I think it uses ghost pack too, cause I'm pretty sure I landed a few shots on him and nothing happened.

Anywho, since the spoon bots merely simulate jetting, they don't actually use energy to fly, thus this cunty mc cunt face has infinite energy and uses death ray nearly constantly. It's as if builder mode is on and he's using the cutting laser. It appears to be able to detect me from well beyond fog distance... If I fly too high anywhere within the mission area boundaries, it shoots me. Rapidly. It takes like 4-5 shots to kill me when I'm in titan with shields, but it takes this dick head bot like 2-3 seconds to land all 4-5 shots. That's not usually enough time to get close enough to see him let alone shoot back.

Please drain the bots energy when they fly, allow mission area boundaries to kill them, and for the love of god program them so they don't have happy mod like abilities.

[Erowid]

I've noticed that same erratic movements with the tank bot

[perrinoia]

Is the drop box up to date? I'd be happy to take a whack at it.

[AnniDv6]

Damn sounds crazy I will have to take a look. So far they are using the same files from spoonbot for navigation so it's strange that one spawns out of bounds, but I can make a new treefile for that map. I made the treepoints look like a motion sensor when you place them so it's pretty easy to run around a map and give them navigation points. They seem to bounce off the border like normal if they are already in bounds, but we should probably make them die if they get out of bounds at all as well. I gave them the same reload times as players have for whichever weapon so it's not surprising that the death ray bot is OP, will probably have to tone that down.

No not on dropbox yet, I will get it on there. I also want to add all the deployables to the list of what they will target to attack. So far they will kill enemy base assets only.

[perrinoia]

Good idea. Many moons ago, I wrote a bot script that used path markers as normal walking waypoints, and drop point markers to apply impulse. When the bot reached the drop point marker, I'd apply impulse using the name of the marker as the launch distance and the rotation of the marker as the launch direction.

Then I wrote a script that created a bot path from my own movements and skied routes around each map. It wasn't as successful as I'd hoped because the bots weren't constantly jumping like I was to maintain skiing, and when I programmed them to constantly jump, they constantly bunny hopped. It was more annoying than practical.

Definitely needed tweaking at the time, but I lost interest and I'm pretty sure that script is on an old broken hard drive. I'll have to rewrite it from scratch now, or download spoonbots and tweak that.

[AnniDv6]

Huh someone was just asking in the annihilation.info discord if anybody made a script like that before. I dunno that anybody really runs routes in annihilation anymore, but that could be fun to use on the ski maps as a ghost. Pretty sure Bob made something similar once too.

[perrinoia]

I was just rewriting it and decided I should use triggers instead of drop point markers. I can stretch the triggers until they touch the ground, since bots don't really control their flight. If they get knocked off their paths, they'll end up crawling to the next waypoint. If the waypoint is in the air, it won't be able to launch them to the next waypoint, but if it's a trigger that stretches from the ground to at least the height they should be flying, it's more likely to detect them and launch them in the next direction.

I also added and hidden any item to the path that the player recording the route is holding, so when creating the bot, you can use Group::iterateRecursive(%path, GameBase::virtual, "onContact"); to give the bot all of the items, although that won't work with the armor, I don't think... I'll have to devise a work around for that.

[Azul]

I was coming here just to say the bots should have unlimited energy and regenerate health lol. Have not encountered the happymod like sniping. If anything, they always just slightly miss me when sniping, even when I'm not moving around that erratically.

Love the bots, some bugs and thoughts:

1: I tested giving the flag after I snatched it to different bots. The Titan Bot that guards the flag, if you give him the flag, he caps it in quick succession twice and your team gets 2 points. Have no idea what is causing that bug.
2: They talk way too much. Maybe reduce it to after they get a kill or die?
3: Anyway to make their movement speed faster? Like make them twice as fast when walking? Too easy to pick off especially when they are knocked off their pathing, they just sit there and act confused for a bit before trying to head back to their path
4: They should not have any grenades/repair kits equipped. Makes it to easy to spam the enemy base when I keep picking up grenades and repair kits.
5: They should regen health slowly like if wearing Troll pack. They are still easier to kill than newbies, this would make them a bit tougher!
6: Replace builder bot since he can't build (for good reason) and seems a bit useless with warrior bot maybe? Would make him a bit beefer and can have better weapons for close range or even equip the shockwave cannon so he's a real pain in the ass

Thanks for all the hard work

[perrinoia]

1: Sweet find... Definitely gonna abuse that till it's fixed!
2: Yes. They definitely talk too much. I don't even wanna see them taunt after a kill. The only chatting they should do is replying to someone mentioning their name to inform them they are just a bot doing what they were programmed to do.
3: Their walking speed is limited by their armor. The only way to make them walk faster is to give them their own special armors, or maybe a mounted item can change the parameters too.
4: I disagree. I think they should have them, but only if they are programmed to use them.
5: Nah... I mean, if they have a repair gun or a troll pack, repair kit, etc... Then sure.. Otherwise, they can re-spawn like the rest of us.
6: They can't build, but maybe they can be programmed to use pitchfork against enemy barriers?

[AnniDv6]

.

1. I noticed that one, too. I'll take a look.

2. Spoonbot already has a toggle to disable their speech, entirely. It's currently in spoonbot_annihilation.cs so it can only be set on or off before launching the server. I intent to make it something you can toggle inside the tab menu in-game, but for now I will turn it off with the next patch. Would also be nice to just generally make them talk less eventually.

5. Pretty sure some of them already regenerate health and it can be a little awkward when you're actively fighting them. I would rather they have to pull out a repair gun or do it after a fight if they won. Maybe they are just using repair kits to do it, I'll have to look.

3,4,6. So currently they are all following a model that was set by Spoonbot where each bot is playing a certain role. For example in Spoonbot the 'painter' bot would go and shoot a targeting laser at enemy base assets and then a 'demo' bot or whichever would come and launch mortars at it. The Painter bot is now a Warrior armor and it's using the Plasma Gun, but following that same code. The 'Guard' bot walks up to damaged friendly base assets and repairs them, he's a Builder now and so on. They are all following of a list. If this, then that.

That's why you aren't seeing Titans going out and going on the offensive. etc. This patch was only the first step which was getting Spoonbot somewhat working with Annihilation. It has a lot of potentially nice features for bots that we have never really had access to in annihilation, but now we need to flush those features out more and iron out the kinks.

I haven't toyed with these following settings yet either so there might be a sweet spot between bots being faster in their actions and server stability that we haven't found yet.

$Spoonbot::ThinkingInterval = 5; //== Interval in sec between which bots will "reconsider" their situation
//== NOTE: RespawnDelay MUST be higher than ThinkingInterval
//== ANOTHER NOTE: The slower your CPU, the higher this should be.


$Spoonbot::MovementInterval = 1.5; //== Interval in sec between calls of the Movement code.
//== This should be generally lower than ThinkingInterval
//== NOTE: Again, the slower your CPU, the higher this should be.
//== If you experience "lag", set these values even higher.

Something else I've been working on is the Arena bots. The mod also now has flying bots for all of the annihilation armors that can be spawned in Arena by the legendz admin only at this point. These ones are a lot more able bodied combat bots which fly much more naturally using a different code for bots written by DeadTaco.

I plan on adding the menu options to spawn them, but right now they aren't stable because they aren't being deleted properly and they "think" and adjust their jetting etc. very frequently compared to the spoonbots so that could be causing issues as well. They are much funner to fight against compared to the spoonbots at this point, but if you spawned one in a CTF match it would just fly around trying to shoot people and nothing else.

@perrinoia so far the only thing they can build are things you can command them to do like deploy motion sensors, inventory stations etc. which I'm sure aren't following deploy checks, item limit etc. at this point so feel free to test that too. If you spawn the _CMD bots those ones don't move at all and don't follow the list, but they will move to where you set their waypoint on the command map. Also multiple weapons they simply can't use yet because there's no AI checks in their functions such as the nuke for titan. Getting jailed or phase shifted caused them to be immortal so I simply disabled those things on bots for the moment.