Eraser Bot

Author: Impact Development Team | Rating: 9.89 | Download: eraser.zip

The Eraser bots are intended to simulate real life human players in multiplayer game modes such as DM and CTF. They work on a node system that they follow to move throughout a map. They’re capable of learning new maps in a short matter of time, if you know how to properly train them. Eraser’s are considered by some the most advanced, and intelligent bots for Quake 2, and that’s just about exactly right.

I ran some tests with the Erasers to see how fast they’re able to learn. I grabbed some custom DM and CTF maps and glued myself to my chair for some testing. I followed the clean route instructions included in the readme, which you should definitely read if you plan on using custom maps, and started walking around through the maps. After around 10 minutes or so with playing with the bots while picking up items and the likes, the bots started to become a challenge. They start off just running and jumping in corners. Slowly they start to explore throughout the map, roaming to and from items. After around 10 minutes of gathering items and carefully walking around the map, the bots were easily collecting most every item in the DM maps, sometimes even hard to reach items. In CTF they took a bit longer, around 15 minutes to understand how to get to and from the bases. Its especially difficult for them to get the hang of there being many entrances in and out of the base. If you notice they’re consistently using the same flag running paths, then read the readme, and it’ll show you how you can get them to choose different routes to the flag. The more time and care you put into making the routes, the better the challenge you’ll get. If you follow the instruction word for word, you’ll get a very tough enemy to face. If you run around rampantly through the level disregarding the instruction, amazingly enough, the Eraser’s will still put up a decent challenge, just not as good as they could be.

They don’t have any problems at all with DM, they roam and collect items like they should, nothing over spectacular, they make a perfect DM opponent. Team DM is also supported if a bit of team play is what you thirst for. The part I like most about the Eraser’s is the CTF support though. You can bind hotkeys to tell your bots to rush, defend, or roam freely. If you’re a good defender and needing some points, tell them to rush base, and they’ll come back with the flag, even though it might take them a few minutes. If you leave them in freestyle they still play positions pretty well, they won’t leave your base empty, and they’ll keep pressure on the other team. What I found impressive is the bots on the opposing team that don’t have a human to tell them what to do. They’ll send their whole team barging into your flag room and rip your flag right out of its post. Other times you’ll come into their base and its almost as if they knew you were coming, as they sit there with rocket launchers cocked and loaded. Oh, and watch out, they do know how to use that grapple hook, and if you have the flag you better be careful, they’ll have an X on your head.

Along with the bots comes a nice Eraser Bot Launcher, Quick Start, that will help you quickly get your game/server setup and ready to go with some bots. It will let you tweak just about anything, personalize your own bots, and save your config files for use later. Also if you save your configuration, there’s another program that comes with the bots is Quick Run, which will quickly run Eraser configs, so you don’t have to go through the hassle of setting everything up again. The bots alone rock, then you throw in this easy to use launcher, and you’ve got one sweet package. If you’re looking for some bots to play DM, TDM, or CTF, then grab the Eraser bot.

- f4nt