2001/04/01

After looking over the HPB bot code, I've put together at least a
preliminary effort of porting it to a metamod plugin.  There's a lot about
the world of bots and their code that I don't understand yet, so there may
very well be things I've missed.  I've done only limited testing, with
cstrike under linux, and used only the "addbot" command.

Some remaining issues that I've identified:

 - The bots don't seem to honor the mp_freezetime at the beginning of the
   cstrike round.  I'm frozen waiting for the countdown to finish, and
   they're already running around.  I don't know if this is normal for HPB
   under cstrike, or if it's related to my diffs to the code or to running
   under metamod. 

 - The HPB plugin has to be loaded at hlds startup (in the metamod.ini); it
   can't be loaded during a map, or between map changes.  The problem is
   that the bot code relies on being able to catch the RegUserMsg calls,
   which appear to occur only at game startup, and are not repeated on
   changelevels.  
   
   One thing I'm planning to look at is to have metamod manage the
   RegUserMsg calls and then provide the necessary information to plugins
   through some interface, so that they won't have to catch the actual
   RegUserMsg calls themselves and thus allow plugins like bots that need
   the msgs to be loaded at any time.

 - I currently have the HPB_bot's plugin info set to allow unloading and
   pausing at any time.  It's amusing to be able to pause the bot plugin,
   and see the bots freeze, and then unpause them and let 'em start running
   again. :)  However, if you unload the plugin, then it unloads without
   removing/kicking the bots.  
   
   Currently the loadable/unloadable settings available in metamod for a
   plugin don't allow the ability to specify "unloadable between maps, but
   pausable at any time; there's only "unloadable and pauseable at any
   time".  I haven't decided if I want to include that option, or if
   instead HPB should just kick all its bots upon meta_detach; I'm leaning
   toward the latter, but wasn't familiar enough with the bot code to add
   that logic.

 - In the HPB code, commands from the server console are done through
   cvars.  This could be re-done to use actual console commands, now that
   REG_SVR_COMMAND is available in SDK 2.1, but I didn't feel like taking
   the time to do that. :)

This is based on the HPB sourecode (template version #3, v1.2b?) at:
   http://dl.fileplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?planethalflife/botman/HPB_bot_template_3.zip