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Topic Starter	Topic: Anything to do the legwork for a single-player mod?
Marscaleb Gibblet Joined: 01 Nov 2016 Posts: 18	Posted: 10-04-2023 01:30 PM                  I was thinking about making a single-player game with Quake 3. I'm wondering if there are any tools/assets/etc available to lay the groundwork for such a project. Most importantly, has anyone created any enemy AI code that other people can use in another project? Perhaps has anyone tried to port over the enemy patterns from Quake 1 or Quake 2? Or established some framework to make it easy to adjust the behavior of the deathmatch bots? This is for something I'm just considering at the moment; I'm doing some research for my next project. I was thinking it might be fun to try to develop something with the Quake 3 engine, but I want to get an idea of what I'm really up against before I do so.
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Foo Timed Out Joined: 02 Aug 2000 Posts: 38064	Posted: 10-04-2023 09:06 PM                    EntityPlus is, I think, the closest things to a singleplayer scaffolding. Biggest challenge really is that Q3 came out as multiplayer only with just bot matches as the 'single player' component, so a ton of stuff you'd expect for a singleplayer campaign just isn't there. IIRC even EntityPlus re-uses the bot code for NPC enemies on singleplayer maps. Eraser is still an active poster here and made the mod, so can give a far more detailed comment than me.
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Eraser Cool #9 Joined: 01 Dec 2000 Posts: 44139	Posted: 10-04-2023 09:18 PM                    Hi Yes, EntityPlus is what you're looking for https://github.com/TheEnginesOfCreation/EntityPlus Like Foo said, there's no specific single player AI code in there. You can use triggers to spawn a bot in a specific place which stays out of the game once dead. This way you can mimic regular SP enemies. There are some things you can do to adjust bot behavior. You can define a route along which a bot should patrol until it sees you, you can force a bot to walk while patrolling or to always walk (never run) and you can force them to ignore the player altogether. The GitHub page has everything you need. Try some of the levels available there to get an idea of the possibilities the mod offers.
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Marscaleb Gibblet Joined: 01 Nov 2016 Posts: 18	Posted: 10-07-2023 08:13 AM                  Cool! I searched around and found this video of something someone made with the toolset. I'm noticing a lot of things here; scripted events, cutscenes, and carrying items... Definitely looks pretty sweet! That said, the enemies still behave like Quake 3 bots; I'm not sure if this is what I want for what I'm doing... I'm researching engines for a project I want to pursue, and I'm leaning toward either Quake 2 or Quake 3. Quake 3 has better support for multiplayer and a host of other improvements and options. I could see myself achieving a lot by learning how to make games from Quake 3. But Quake 2 has a real single-player campaign that I can work off of, giving me the groundwork for what I really want to do. (Multiplayer is just a secondary concern.) It looks like if I went with Quake 3 I'd still need to build new enemy patterns from the ground-up just to make them move/behave in the way I want them to, and I'm not so sure I have the capacity to pull that off. It's a great-looking toolset though; it's definitely something that would have gotten me excited back when my goals were different.
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Eraser Cool #9 Joined: 01 Dec 2000 Posts: 44139	Posted: 10-07-2023 08:26 AM                    The Quake 2 remaster source code is available so you could use that as a basis as well. I think the remaster can achieve close to visual parity with Quake 3. Might be a good starting point. https://github.com/id-Software/quake2-rerelease-dll I built EntityPlus to give myself and other level designers the ability to express themselves creatively and allowing them to tell stories through single player levels while sticking to their existing Quake 3 content creation tools and pipelines.
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Marscaleb Gibblet Joined: 01 Nov 2016 Posts: 18	Posted: 10-07-2023 08:17 PM                  The visuals are actually going to look more like Quake 1 or maybe a PS1 or N64 game; what interested me about Quake 3 was the much-improved netcode and overall increase of options for things I can do from a technical side. Didn't know the remaster's code was available; I suppose they improved the netcode for that version? I'll take a look. I do appreciate what you've done with EntityPlus; I would have been all over that back in the day.
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