Itchy The QuakeBot

Proud member of    The Bot Author's Guild

News
 

April 23, 1998

I have been extremely busy with research and stuff at school so the Itchy has been thrown aside (yet again).  The main news is that I have updated some of the links on these pages.  Some of them were pretty stale.  Please let me know if you find any links that are not working so that I can fix them! Actually I have had a chance to toy around with Itchy a bit.  The re-write is pretty much done -- Itchy is back to his former glory (with a few extras).  Now he can dodge any threatening missiles and pick up objects that he can see.  Now I am working on a BSP navigation routine.  It will consist of using a directed graph containing "floor" polygons (i.e. ones that can be walked upon).  The main problems, I believe, will be the handling of moving platforms as well as jumping (to some extent). I have also implemented a module that reads messages from the Quake server.  So now Itchy can see which people are talking and also can motitor kill messages.  Now he can tell who killed him and who he has killed.  This is one of the parameters used to adjust the "hate" level of the other players. So things are progressing -- although very slowly.

October 17, 1997

Well, the re-write is coming along slowly -- school is keeping me quite busy.  However, during the rewrite I created a proxy that will deliberately slow down your connection to a Quake server.  It is called The HPB Proxy.  For more information (like why the hell would you want to use it) and downloading see the HPB Proxy Homepage.  With respect to the re-write, the new version will be radically different (code-wise) than the original.  I have pretty well removed the message based communications  between the bot modules.  This should speed things up as well as programming the bot AI to be more versatile.

August 1997

News has now been added to give you a up-to-the minute (or month - depending on how busy I am with school) account of Itchy's progress.  I have begun a complete re-write of the Itchy source code.  This should add some more functionality while cleaning things up a lot.  Hopefully, this should lead to a release of a binary distribution of Itchy sometime soon.  During this re-write, I am attempting a port the code to AIX as well.

April 1997

An actual bot has been added into the code!  Fire control, BSP line-of-sight, and simple lava avoidance have been created.  This will be version 0.2.

February 1997

Version 0.1 completed.  This version handles the network protocol.  It is simply a proxy to play Quake through.

Features

     Itchy is a Client side QuakeBot which I have been developing since the beginning of the year (1997).  Since I do have other work to do, sometimes Itchy gets ignored for large periods of time.  Itchy is written in C++, compiled using the Gnu C++ compiler (gcc), and is designed for the Linux operating system.

    So far I have been able to implement:

• The TCP/IP network connection to a Quake server.
• ScratchyVision^TM - A proxy that can be used to see what Itchy is up to.  As well, it can be used to control the bot in various ways: either full bot or proxy control as well as having Itchy simply aim and fire for you.  The proxy accepts multiple connections to allow many players to observe Itchy.  Only the primary proxy connection may send control commands to the bot.
• Target Box models used to show, through the proxy, available targets as well as the current target (see Itchy in Action).
• A console system that can be used to query and and control the bot when ScratchyVision^TM is not being used.  The same language can be used through the proxy as well.
• A prediction based weapons control system.  It tries to kill the most "hated" player in sight and uses line-of-sight obtained from traversing the BSP tree.  A good grenade launcher aiming system is still needed (it can only hit stationary targets).
• Simple Lava avoidance.  Full fledged navigation is still in the development stages (very primitive).

How did I do all of this?  First, it took a lot of time.  For further information, see my QuakeBot Programming Page.

Downloads

     Sorry, but currently there is no version of Itchy available for download (yet).  When I clean a few things up, there might be a Linux (ELF) binary made available for testing.  Ports to other operating systems (such as Microsloth Winblows) is not currently in my plans.  As for source code releases, there will probably never be any unless I clean up or re-write the entire works from scratch (the code is not very friendly to look at).

Itchy in Action

Here are some screenshots through ScratchyVision^TM during a one-on-one battle at Quake'n'Bake (sorry about the quality, they are JPEG compressed for faster viewing!):

Copyright © 1997 Chad Dreveny
All rights reserved.