Birds Bot Manager
An advanced bot manager for Half-Life and its mods
*** Danger - Danger - Danger *** Under Construction
BBM is BETA QUALITY software. This means that some design changes are still
taking place, and the API may still change without warning from one release to the next.
Summary
BBM (Birds Bot Manager) is a library that loads into halflife as a "mod" and
provides a nice API and development environment for people who want to play around
with writing bots for Half-Life or any of its variants (CounterStrike, TFC, etc).
BBM loads the "real" MOD dll and passes function calls transparently
between the MOD and Half-Life. It is able to create and manage bots using loadable
modules ("Bots") supplied by Bot programmers.
I have been working on this for the last few weeks, and maybe it is 90% finished.
There is more code and documentation to write, and more work is required to produce
a fully functional bot that uses this API, but enough is done that some interesting
bots are possible right now.
Rapid progress is being made, and various friends of mine are actively working on
bot code using BBM.
Documentation
These sections are all recommended reading
Still to do...
- Umm, more callbacks, more documentation.
- Add "sound" messages so the bots can hear.
- Port BBM to Linux.
- Port botmans HPB bot across to BBM and then write up a HOWTO for all the
people who have based their bots on his code.
- Write a launcher similar to MBL, or maybe get the MBL author to support BBM.
- Actually get around to writing my own bot :-)
- Investigate preemptive multitasking for bots. Cooperative multitasking sucks.
Source to BBM
Resources (compilers, tools, editors etc...)
Don't want to go looking for the tools that you need? Don't worry, I have
copies of them all here...
Sample Bot code and Tutorial
BBM comes with a number of very simple bots that show off some of the features. Follow
this link to read a bit about these bots.
Who is using BBM?
Credits
Thanks to Botman for making available
the source to his Bot template. His code taught me all I know about HL bot programming :-)
Feedback
You can email me with suggestions, comments etc.