Legacy:Mod Ideas/Talkative Bots

Mod ideas for UT2003 – When is a bot not a bot? When it talks back

Description

When you play on public servers for a while you realise that there are only a couple of things people every say, like "gg", "n1", "gs" etc etc and most of those are abbreviations. This little mutator (probably a mutator anyway) will ensure that the bots all say "gg", or "well get ya next time" at the end of the level. If you type in "n1" or "gs" after being killed by a bot then the bot will reply with a "ta :)". There's probably a few other variations I can add in here, and those along with "bot talking to bot" interactions should make it rather more believable. One thing I'm not going to add is anything even remotely abusive or offensive. I'm aiming for a sort of "friendly - smug" kind of environment here.

Interested Scripters

If you are interested in developing this mod for UT2003 then add your name to the list. Once you start development you should indicate that below (and hopefully include a link to a journal page). Before you start development you should also check this section to see if anyone else has started.

Discussion

Birelli: A few more exchanges for the bots:

1. After every cap, teamate bots could say "gj" or "nice cap"
2. If there are teamates nearby when a bot caps they could say "thx for the cover" and any nearby bot to that could say 3 seconds later "np"
3. If there are more than 3 opponents within ~1024 world units of the flag and the bot dies while within that radius of the opponent's flag they could say "someone pitch a tent" :smile:
4. If a player that kills them was within the same ~256 world unit radius for, say, 15 seconds, the bot could say something about campers (but it has to be something self-deprecating, it can't be a flame, I'm not sure exactly what)
5. I'm not sure how well it would work but after the first minute or so of gameplay a couple random bots could say "lo" to any incoming player, or if a bot comes in to replace an outgoing player they could say "lo all" or "hi all"

All of these could use some variations like ">>>Nice Cap "x"<<< with the name of the player who capped for instance, and of course randomness is a necessity, and the lower down a player is on the overall frag list the more likely they should be to chat or something like that, and the higher up the more likely to say "thx for cover" and "nice cap" and stuff. That's just the feeling I've gotten about who tends to say different things.

Also, the game should fake a ping for all the bots (something ~100 for bots doing well dropping off to ~300 for bots getting nailed a lot).

Birelli: I just had another though, the server could keep a list in a .ini file of different amounts of player times and top players could be met with bots saying "oh darn, and we were winning too", or even (and this would be hilarious) "I've got no chance against 'Player X', I'm out" and be replaced by a different bot (that would have to have a VERY low chance of happening and only if the bot wasn't currently engaged). Players with just lots of minutes on the server could have bots say "lo 'Player X'" or some variation thereof.

EntropicLqd: lol. Very sweet ideas. I love the idea of a bot bailing out just because a "scary" player comes on-line. And faking a ping for them - hee hee.

The Twiggman Great idea. Just like quake 3. You can say something to a bot and they will chat back. Fun to get your rage out. Would be quite intresting to see bots behave much like players by bailing in and out of the game. You could maybe set an open game and the bots can pop in and out and pop caps at the same time.

JaFO : So other people have had the same idea ... I've been thinking about making a "bitching Betty"-type bot too.

Like Eliza-chatprograms (or is it Elisa ?) it reacts to player-messages and possibly add a few comments of its own. Perhaps even different personalities ...

Dezro: (Player): $uck 1t, b1tche$! (Bot): Why do you say $uck 1i, b1tche$? (Player): WTF? (Bot): I would appreciate it if you would continue. (Player): STFU, bitch! (Bot): Is it because of your sex life that you say STFU, bitch?

Piglet: Sounds like an intresting idea, I think it could be 'fairly' intresting to program too. However i dont really have the skills to setup the interface for the bots to talk through if you know what i mean. It would also be nice to load text from some sort of .cht file or whatever, again i have no clue how this would be done :(

SabbathCat: Some guy made a talking Titan mod for DeathMatch levels in a couple of UT maps . Worked pretty well, looked good when you had 4 talking at once. There wasn't any Chat AI as such though, just a bunch of taunts called from a list randomly at regular intervals or after a frag/death. Would it be possible to parse previous player text and pick up on words and retort back, like JaFo talks about?

Foxpaw: I think that would get a bit crazy if you play games with lots of bots. (over 10 a side sometimes) Making the bots seem more like human players would probrably be a good thing though.

Lev: I’m planning on something similar to this as an entry to the make something unreal contest. The talkative side would be a more minor feature in this thou. What I plan to do is take all the attributes of players that really ruin a game and modify a bot to act like that because that is what is really missing from offline botmatches the idiots! Called IdiBots they would do such things as in Bombing Run you would pass them the ball and they would start running to your own goal and pass the ball to the other team, in team matches (with FF off) would repeatable shoot you even thou it they can't hurt you and try to telefrag you with the translocator. The talkative side would come in when you tried talk to them, just like in real life they would start hurling mom put downs at you. Of course they would all have 3ll3t speak names and when they leave they would say something along the lines of “gtg my mom needs the computer.”

Kerlin: Something by the Drunken Snipers already does this, I think. It's called Bullshit. Sorry, don't have a link handy.

Lev: Yes i know of that by our very own El_Muerte_TDS, link to Bullshit on his page :)

Sweavo: if you want to go teh hardcore, look up A.L.I.C.E. on teh net and build a full on A.I. conversation engine into the bot - and get banned from most servers for the ridiculous extra load :-)

T-1: I would recommend having a look at Markov Chains.