1 Bot causes massive slowdown

[Anonymous]

Hola,

I'm running a P2/450 with 256 megs of ram that normally runs Zdoom just fine. However, I've got a (very complex) pwad I'm working on. The Pwad runs just fine, no problems, but when I add a single bot to the game, it slows down to almost single-digit framerates.

The bots run fine on the normal levels, so clearly it's a problem with my pwad. Any advice on things that can be done to make it more bot-friendly?

Thanks.

[Hirogen2]

Of course... the bot needs path nodes (or some sort of) for the whole level, so performance is inverse to the (complexity*(bots+OtherStuff)).

[Bio Hazard]

how do you add path nodes anyway? is there some special thing for it?

[Curunir]

I always thought the path nodes were built on the fly when they enter a particular level. And I've never heard of placing special entities in maps to guide bots.

[Hirogen2]

Yes, they are build on the fly if they cannot be found. I do not know how to generate them, there is probably some utility as some WADs do have precompiled nodes.

[HotWax]

AFAIK there is no way to add custom bot nodes (correct me if I'm wrong?). When you first add bots to a level, they will watch the player(s) in the level and learn the movement of the level from him... in theory. Basically, as players move around they drop invisible "bread crumbs" (the bot nodes) that the bots use to move around the map. Thus the more you play, the more they learn the map.

IIRC, there is a cvar (can't remember it right now, I think it's off by default) that allows saving botnodes... somewhere... so that next time you load that level they can pick up where they left off.

IMHO, the bots are still too dumb to be of any real use. Perhaps for deathmatches on very simple levels, but I've never been able to get coop bots to leave the starting area, and even when they are around, they spend most of their time dying rather then helping me kill stuff.

[Enjay]

Which version of Zdoom are you running? An old version (forget which) used to have very noticable slowdown when a bot had/used the rocket launcher.

[Hirogen2]

There seems to be no more command to save them. The only ones who contain "node" -- and I am pretty sure that node-saving command had node in it somewhere -- are gennodes and genglnodes, but which are for BSP.

[randi]

You all give the bots too much credit. They are very stupid and just wander the level aimlessly with AI basically equivalent to a regular monsters. The only thing they keep track of on the level is the locations of all the items. In co-op games, if you get too far away from a bot, you'll probably never see it for the rest of the game, because it has no idea how to reach you.

[HotWax]

You all give the bots too much credit. They are very stupid and just wander the level aimlessly with AI basically equivalent to a regular monsters. The only thing they keep track of on the level is the locations of all the items. In co-op games, if you get too far away from a bot, you'll probably never see it for the rest of the game, because it has no idea how to reach you.

Hrmm, what bots was I thinking of then?

[Enjay]

What are these actors, that get listed with dumpclasses, for?

CajunBodyNode
CajunTrace

The only thing I can see any evidinece of something happening when summoning these is with IDDT on twice in the automap, CajunTrace seems to fire an invisible, no damage projectile.

[Graf Zahl]

Both of these objects are used internally for some calculations. They both have no specific properties, are both invisible and totally unusable outside the bot code. And, yes, CajunTrace is an invisible projectile.

[HotWax]

CajunTrace is probably used for determining if there is anything between the bot and the target it's about to fire at . . . or something like that.

As for CajunBodyNode, ya got me.