Quake3World

I'm not sure if this has been asked or posted, I cant find it anywhere so my apologies if this has already been discussed. This is in regards to last year's hoax that went viral http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07 ... 29082.html.

I was wondering whether anyone tried recreating that and actually testing it out. Although last time I played Q3A was in about '01 or '02 I found my old CD (still works) and am running 2 dedicated servers on an old laptop that I've stashed away so it can just sit there and run. The servers have been up for about half a day now, still no problems - I've been able to log in from other PCs on my home network, I switch to the spectator on Free for All immediately and the CTF server places me as a spectator straight away which I think it does by default, I can't remember it's been too long.

Here are the cfg files for both servers:

Server 1:
seta sv_hostname "CannibalCorpse"
seta sv_maxclients 10
seta g_motd "You are here forever"
seta g_quadfactor 3
seta g_gametype 0
seta timelimit 0
seta fraglimit 0
seta g_weaponrespawn 3
seta g_log "logs\games.log"
seta g_logsync "3"
sv_maxRate 10000
map q3dm1
addbot uriel 5
addbot anarki 5
addbot bitterman 5
addbot lucy 5
addbot orbb 5
addbot bones 5
addbot klesk 5
addbot phobos 5

Server 2:
seta sv_hostname "CannibalCorpse"
seta sv_maxclients 12
seta g_motd "You are here forever"
seta g_quadfactor 3
seta g_gametype 4
seta timelimit 0
seta fraglimit 0
seta capturelimit 0
seta g_weaponrespawn 3
seta g_log "logs\games-ctf.log"
seta g_logsync "3"
sv_maxRate 10000
map q3ctf4
addbot uriel 5 blue 50 Uriel
addbot anarki 5 blue 50 Anarki
addbot bitterman 5 blue 50 Bitterman
addbot lucy 5 blue 50 Lucy
addbot orbb 5 blue 50 Orbb
addbot sorlag 5 red 50 Sorlag
addbot grunt 5 red 50 Grunt
addbot xaero 5 red 50 Xaero
addbot bones 5 red 50 Bones
addbot klesk 5 red 50 Klesk

The logs are only at about 4Mb each so far, so even after a year It'll only be around 7Gb for both servers so I won't run out of space in a hurry.

The thing that I can't find (and I assume was made up) are the so called "AI logs". On the screenshots they appear to be in the main Q3 directory under bots/model name http://i.imgur.com/dx7sVXj.jpg (scroll to the bottom). The files themselves are called AI-LOG1.DAT. Am I right in assuming this is all a load and that these files dont exist and that the only logs that Q3A generates are the game logs?

Anyway, if anyone has any insights on those "AI" logs above please let me know - or maybe if someone has already tried recreating this, I'd be keen to hear about the results. Otherwise I'll just let that old laptop sit there and run. Although it is running Windows 7 so I think it'll probably crash well before the bots do anything interesting, might do an Ubuntu install on it, that should last for quite a while I imagine.

it says so in the actual article you linked to:

Update: Alas. As we suspected (see our note at the end of the original story), it appears that this wonderful tale was too good to be true. We've been tipped that the original post was actually a joke, and that it was subsequently taken too seriously by the Internet - and, well, us. Apologies for those who found hope in the tale, but we still feel there may be a lesson in it for humanity, somewhere. Put down the guns, Quake 3 aliens, robots and killing machines. All you need is love - and a taste for viral internet humour.

also, Q3 bots don't "learn". They have their characteristics set in their respective bot files, things like aggressiveness, weapon preference, etc.
nothing gets logged, archived or filled up. they just do what they're told. courtesy of JPvWaveren.

Yup I thought I was pretty clear in my original post that I understand that this was a hoax, all I was trying to do was to see what would actually happen if you were to actually complete the experiment.

Thanks MKJ for the info, I did end up reading through some parts of this here: http://www.kbs.twi.tudelft.nl/docs/MSc/ ... thesis.pdf to see whether there was any merit to the bots "learning". Oh well I'll leave it running for a while there and will see what happens anyway.

I guess I should have expected the outcome - I've had a dig through the logs for the past day and a half. Looking at the amount of frags by player or the number of frags by each weapon - it's just a straight line with very minor changes, so in the end it's just the law of averages with these bots. Would've been cool to see some weird patterns but here we are.

Too bad this isn't a graph for human players, because it's kind of interesting to see there have been nearly just as many shotgun frags as direct RL hit frags.

Just take any log man, I just used notepad++ to convert it to a CSV and then pivot table to sort it properly. These logs were massive because the round is infinite and went on for about 36 hours or whatever it was, but normal logs will be much more manageable.

Hmm.....I have to state that my experience with bots is that they do eventually adapt somehow. My playing style is very much a pattern-run through powerups in proper timing. Grunt and Major on Q3DM13 (Lost World) is one of my favorite maps, as it's self-convoluted, has balanced powerups on either side, lots of levels to choose from, and offers a solid challenge with nightmare bots. On this level, if played over time without turning off my computer, it seems the bots have strayed away from full-on frontal assaults, and have actually developed increased tactics to counter my patterns and methods. Examples............

Firstly, where the medikit/grenade launcher is, Grunt would originally charge me as soon as I would jump up the pad. Now, after me having annihilated him a number of times, he sometimes waits a distance away for ambush, or avoids me entirely.

Secondly, in the first dozen or so games against him, he was running constantly, and would never stop running but for literally a few seconds here and there. Now, I hear him regularly run and stop, run and stop, sometimes stopping for a very long time. It's like he's listening or waiting for me.

Thirdly, a few times now I've been on the middle Red Armor drop-down area, waiting for him to drop down that little chute so I can get an easy frag. (It's funny as hell to slightly bounce him in it 3 to 8 times in a row, hearing him huff and hork until he dies ) And when I'm there waiting, he has a few times jumped CLEAR off the top level, straight down to the lava, ROCKET JUMPED UP and fired at me, up to twice in a row before retreating through the teleport. That was impressive to say the least, and it only happened after I'd played him in that level about two dozen times.

Fourthly, I realized he at first would run off when he'd go through that bottom teleport. But now, if I'm low on health/armor, he'll wait for me most times. And I mean really wait. Like over a minute. Which is not in alignment at all with the public ideas about Q3 AI.

Now I don't have any idea if this is all real or if this is just happening in my head. But as Dumbledore observed: "of course it's all happening in (my) head...why on earth should that mean that it isn't real?"

I'd be curious to hear impressive acts bots have done which might seem odd or outside the bounds of standard approach and shoot tactics.

Hanzz2016 wrote:Which is not in alignment at all with the public ideas about Q3 AI.

Quake 3 is open source. There are no secret tricks the bots do in terms of learning. If you don't believe that just check the source code yourself.

Even when the poster changed the map, the bots continued to stand still. And when he joined in the game the bots continued to “just stand there”.

“They would rotate to look at me,” he said. “I walked around a little bit and they all just kept looking at me.”

I've had that happen to me before. But that's because I compiled a map and forgot to add the -forcesidesvisible switch on AAS so the bots were effectively lobotomized. Want world peace? Just poke some brains out with a stick.