[ivan2]

So I've been holding off on saying anything here for a while, because I'm always a little worried about what the Frozen Sands team will have to say. But here is what I have done:

About four months ago I was working on a piece of software to regulate the number of bots in a running server, when I inadvertently wrote in a infinite loop that added bots by the millions on one team (or until the server was full). There were three of us on the server testing on this piece of software when things went wrong and to my surprise the other two players really got a kick out of the swarm of bots on the opposing team. The game mode was set to TDM so it really does get old when you have a constant swarm of bots that keep killing you when you spawn.

A few weeks later after playing around with servers full of bots, I caught on that survivor mode against bots makes it so you don't respawn in a swarm of bots and you now have to worry about dying. So I got a very primitive 'admin' script going that added bots to one team so players that joined were forced to the other team. Nothing was to stop the players from switching teams and joining the bots (and wrecking everyone else's hope of living to see the end) nor was I going to do anything about it. I just figured it was just a fun accident and I was just going to let it be until we needed that space for something else.

A few days later I rejoined and the server was filled to capacity (10 players 40 bots, not a lot of players) with players who were eager to blow off steam at some of those pesky bots. I was surprised to see any number of players join at all, since it seemed to crash about once ever 30 minutes on average. But none of them ever so much as complained about it - they even expressed how much they liked the setup.

So after a couple of weeks of work I made a little bit of progress on the project, but ultimately I put it down. The program I was using was half baked and tended to hangup once every day.

So after putting this to rest I would like to bring this project back to life and I would like to go through official channels. I have no idea how this works, but I would like to contribute to UrT and be in good standing with everyone here. Here is what I have:

I have made changes to the source code of the engine:
The log file is no longer used but instead tty sends its output over a port specified net_rlogport to the localhost for an external admin program. I also added a function that sends out the position and orientation of every player along with how many rounds fired and weapon reloads. None of the numbers for the clients are changed and everything else is intact and untouched.

And I have changed the way the game works by sending rcon commands:
When a player does the command /team r or b, the player is forced to join the blue team. Bots are always forced to the red team. There are different 'levels' of difficulty that the players are up against and bots are removed or added (with different skill and gear) depending on the win or loose streak of the blue team.


My label for this 'gametype' - not sure what category this falls under - is "COOP", short for CO-Operative Mode. And when it was running I found it was quite successful in living up to its name, because never before have I seen players be so encouraging and offering so much advice to new players about how to survive round and good ammo conservation tactics.

So before I continue I would like to make sure I'm not working the category of 'stupid ammo hack', but in a semi-legitimate fashion of something that can actually contribute to UrT as a whole.

Depending on what happens next I would like to release my work thus far and even bring more people into this 'project'.

Thanks,
Ivan2 - Ian

PS is this the right place to post this???