Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukka, Happy Kwanzaa, etc!

Hope everyone has a great holiday and new year!

We're still around, and were still making progress. Been a while since we mentioned anything publicly, so I wanted to post a status update.

0.8 is looking pretty good. Were nearing a point that we can merge to the ET mods and probably put out a beta or something. Merging to the mods is a bit of a pain in the ass though. Hopefully 0.8 can be in a releasable state relatively soon, but no promises. Im relegated to late evening work on the bot, being a dad and all.

In other news, Omni-bot support is being added to a HL2 mod called Modular Combat. I got sick of waiting for Valve to fix their bot plugin support, and as I was looking around for interesting HL2 mods I came across Modular Combat and it caught my eye in the unique concept. Basically it's a mod in HL2DM maps, with HL2DM weapons, in which you gain experience by killing players or the AI controlled monsters from HL2. As you level up, your character, you can spend points to purchase 'modules' that provide a huge variety of interesting abilities, from health/armor/ammo regeneration, to jetpacks, teleportation, spawning minions that fight for you, turrets, trip mines, etc. You also gain weapon points, which allow you to upgrade ~5 different properties of each of the weapons. It's great fun to kill players and HL2 monsters in a multiplayer environment and work towards improving your character. Your character progress is persistent by the way, so you can come back later and keep developing him. There are also cooperative based game modes, where the players fight against waves of HL2 creatures of varying levels and strength.

The RPG elements of Modular Combat are what caught my eye from a player standpoint, and because that type of thing would be very fun to get bots working with. As of right now, bots can develop their characters, purchase modules and weapon upgrades, spawn minions, use abilities, etc. It's quite fun. It's breathed new life into Omni-bot, as I must admit most of us are getting tired of ET and are itching to get into a more modern game. I was hoping Team Fortress 2 would have been that game, but without Valves plugin bot fixes, I'm stuck building the bots directly into mods that allow me to.

We are pleased to present Omni-bot 0.72 for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. This release includes new mod features, bot enhancements, bugfixes, new waypoints, new script goals, and improvements to existing waypoints and scripts.

A complete changelog is here and an updated Readme is here.

Huge thanks to AG3NT. He is responsible for most of the new waypoints and a lot of the improvements to the existing ones. His bug reporting and feature requesting is also appreciated. Thanks to Marcus as well for once again providing dedicated server testing.

This has been a unique project for omni-bot in terms of adding general mod features since all of the existing RTCW mods are closed source. Most likely I won't be adding any new features to the mod side, but I've decided to open source it so anyone else can continue the development. It's hosted here, just pm me (crapshoot) if you need commit privileges.

Enjoy the bot.

note: for best results, it is recommended that you completely uninstall version 0.71 before installing the new version
[Submitted by crapshoot]

This seems to come up daily, so I figured it is worth a news post.

I was working with someone at Valve on the enhanced bot interface that us bot developers have been asking for for years. After a long wait, this person graciously provided their time and worked with me to get a nice new bot interface with access to all the information we need ifrom a server plugin. I was developing Omni-bot on this modified code while I waited for Valve to push the changes out as part of a normal SDK update. Only then would I be able to release the actual Omni-bot for TF2.

Let me clarify that. I am not holding up Omni-bot for TF2 just for the hell of it. The fact is, nobody could run it without those changes from Valve, as that is what I built them on, thinking that it wouldn't be long before the changes were pushed out to everyone and make bot development in general as simple as it should have been from the beginning. Now, it looks like those changes may never be released, and I can't get a useful answer when I inquire about them.

But what about RCBot2 you might ask? The author of RCBot2 worked around the lack of proper bot access to get access to some of the desired information another way. I chose(to my disappointment), that I would build mine on the more 'proper' sdk extensions, and once Valve released those changes, bot development would truely be open and easy for myself, other bot developers, and mods who wish to support 3rd party mods. Unfortunately for me, Valve seems to be letting us down once again, and the release of these enhancements appear to be stalled for reasons unknown.

So there we are. I don't know yet if I can access all the information via the RCBot2 method as I am using with the new interfaces, so it's possible that I could just back-port the changes to the current sdk and access information the ugly way. That may be the only option unfortunately, if Valve ends up not releasing the extended interfaces. I've been holding off on that kind of port while I continue to attempt to push Valve to release the update.

In the meantime, enjoy RCBot2, and congrats to RCBot2 for beating Omni-bot into TF2. The repeated letdowns from Valve with regards to these bot interface changes are just about enough to just want to throw my hands up in frustration.

To summarize. Please stop asking me to release Omni-bot for TF2. In its current state it would be useless to release, as nobody could play it. If/when they do release the update, you will be the first to know, as it would be followed relatively quickly by an early Omni-bot release. Until then, or until I port it to the old SDK(which I probably will), there isn't anything playable by the general public.

For those who are interested, Omni-bot got a page article in PC Gamer in the December 2008 UK issue, and will be in the January 2009 US issue I'm told. Specifically it's to do with TF2 support recently announced, but it is still good exposure to the bot as a whole.

Here's a scan of the article.