Retardz0r bots? Created 18 years ago2005-07-25 13:17:13 UTC by Kantham

OK. I finaly made my first CS:S map with the valve engine and hammer. Well.

I have everything, 2 buying zone that work, 2 bomb zone and alot of spawn point and lightning done. The problem are the bots. After the mesh has been made, the bots are moving foward , and backward constantly. OK. So, i guess it's just another stair problem since the stairs are probably too high?

here's the map if you want to chek it out. (vmf)

http://www.kantham.com/maps/de_old_factory.zip

Only one terorist already moved to the puplic bathroom and got out of it then. But i wonder why they don't place the bomb if there is no stairs to take to get in there. Well , probably they act like that because they can't take the stair, probably they think about the whole level like UT2004 bots and once a link is broken they act like morons. I am pretty sure it's the problem. And sorry if that problem is OVER-ASKED on these forums.

Is there anyway that i can look at the path network from in-game as a spectator to figure out the reall problem?

Thanks.

Well you can play as a spectator, and you could search the console for somethin like "nav_showpaths 1" or sumpin like that... The console shows commands so try finding the 1 u need... And btw this is NOT a HL2 mapping question :

Hm, I'm not sure that Stuff is a better place for it. It can stay here.

Have a look through the console commands prefixed with bot_, Kanth. I've seen some debugging ones which display crazy arrows and stuff all over the place.

I've done this before, but it was awhile ago while I was still mapping for CSS.

The computer tries to generate NAV points for bots automatically, you probably saw it doing this the first time you ran it. But, unless your map is very simple, then it usually does a terrible job.

You need to edit the NAV information in-game. Unfortunately you can't just build your own NAV matrix from scratch -- attempting to do so will crash the game. You have to have the matrix generated by the computer first and then alter what it makes.

I've only got the basics of this so far, but you can seriously help your bots out a lot, even with this small amount of knowledge:

Here's a guide to what to do:

You need cheats enabled for this, so type "SV_CHEATS 1" into the console.

Now type "nav_edit 1" into the console. Close the console and look around. What you are seeing is the navigation matrix of the map, overlayed onto the map itself. If you can't see anything, quit looking at the sky. Move your crosshair over walkable areas. Yeah, that's it.

Those boxes are navigation boxes. They can have several attributes -- the only ones I know about are normal, crouch and jump. These tell bots that they can go to these areas, and recommends a course of action for the bot to follow. IE, in a place where a player must crouch under a half open shutter, you should have a NAV area marked crouch underneath that shutter.

Here are the commands (that I know of) that you can use to edit this mess:

nav_begin_area -- starts a new NAV box at the point your crosshairs are at. It's very useful to have this bound to a key.

nav_end_area -- ends your new NAV box. It's also very useful to have this bound to a key.

(So to make a new box, you point your crossghair at one corner of your intended box, use the begin area command. Then move your crosshair to the opposite corner of your new box, and use the end command. Voila! A new nav zone.)

nav_crouch -- marks an area as a crouch area

nav_jump -- marks an area as a jump area

(you must have the crosshair on your intended target box when you use these)

of course if you screw up, or youi want to get rid of some of the computer's mess.....

nav_delete

will get rid of a NAV area. Again you have to be pointing your crosshair at it.

Now you have to connect areas together. Connections are one way, so you have to make 2 connections between each area if you want your bots to be able to navigate both ways between them.

nav_mark

says to the engine "I want to connect this area to:-"

nav_connect

says to the engine "this area"

I hope that make sense. So anyway, go connect all your nav zones together.

Once you're done,

nav_save

will save all you've done. Restart the map, and hopefully your bots should be somewhat improved.

Hope this helped.

Clip off the stairs too. If you have no clipbrush on them they'll get stuck.

Thanks playbus Yeah i runed that Nav_edit comand and noticed the path network on the ground, i noticed that the bots are auto maticaly hiding behind some objects. That's cool. For the problem, it's obviously the space that each piece of stairs have that make the NAV_generate ignore it.

I will simply remplace stairs by a flat surface in a angle of 45. So the nav will be created

-I noticed that the bombs don't have points to them, I also noticed that the bots (take de_castle for example) will say some thing like "Window" when they will see an enemy from a window. I will have to study that aswell. Espicaly the bomb locations.

And so far i have never experimented Key binding with HL2/CS:S

Another odd thing

With the vertex editor tool, i noticed that when i was editing some verticles from the front view, i aligned my cursor on the verticle and draged it. But instead it made a selection on the grid. Now i can't move the verticle from Top/front/side view anymore, i tried everything , i must select them and move them from the perspective.

And some pretend that UED 3.0 suck compare to this. I don't think so. Hardly.