Psiborg - a Half-Life bot

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Psiborg is a Half-Life 'bot', allowing you to practice your deathmatch skills against computer-controlled opponents. It's designed to be as 'intelligent' and realistic as possible, rather than efficient, incredibly quick, etc.

NEWS

No news for nearly two months <smacks himself around head>. Sorry, everyone. Time permitting, I'll try and update the site weekly/fortnightly. There is a Psiborg FAQ now though, if you care for such things.

I'm still working hard on PsiBSPC, although there's been a bit of internal restructuring. As some of you will know, Half-Life (and therefore Psiborg) was developed using C++. Unfortunately, C++ makes a poor language for heavy testing and prototyping ; if you aren't careful, it's easy to spend more time waiting for recompilation than coding. So, I've recoded the whole thing in Python. As an interpreted language, it's much easier to make quick little changes - and it also lets me use GNU/Linux (which I prefer to Windows anyway).

I'll probably convert the waypoint-er back into C++ before a proper release, and the bot itself remains as C++ code, so don't worry about everything slowing to a crawl just yet. Eventually, I'll distribute PsiBSPC with the Psiborg archive ; you either have the option of pre-converting waypoint files yourself, or waiting for Psiborg to do it on-the-fly. In short, you won't normally have to worry about it.

At the moment, PsiBSPC churns out huge lists of vectors (as well as debugging data). Trying to mentally reconstruct a level given 150 vectors and a list of edges is a nightmare (believe me), so I've tacked on a primitive OpenGL renderer. It's no Quake 3, but it works. Using the proper textures looked like it might take a few hours to work out, so I'm sticking with flat shading for now...

A few people (well, two) have asked me for more details on the algorithms I'm using in PsiBSPC. Many of the ideas are untested, so I'm hesitant to give too much away until I find out just how effective it is. I'm writing an article/'development diary' for the 'Development' section, which will cover everything in exhaustive detail.

Lots of new stuff over the past couple of weeks, and I've finally nailed down most of the design (specifically, the new navigation code).3

Rather than use hand-made waypoint files, Psiborg uses a separate tool (provisionally known as PsiBSPC). PsiBSPC reads your Half-Life 'bsp' files, rips all the level data, and writes various bits of information back on to disc. More in another couple of weeks.

We're still a long, long way from intelligence, but now Psiborg can use waypoint files and choose weapons. It's not very good at either, but at least it's starting to get a taste for killing. Don't read too much into the use of waypoint files - the final code will use something slightly different. More about this later...