Research Activities

Gamebots for Unreal Tournament 2003

As part of our ongoing effort to port our ModSAF translation system to the new Unreal Tournament 2003, I am working on a port of Gamebots to the new game. Keep watching here for updates.

You can get the patches for the old Gamebots here.

The first preliminary port is available here. This port was completed on 21 November 2002.
A new port is now available here. New features include a mostly working protocol. This was completed on 17 December 2002.
Fixed a major bug in my code. Get the newest, dated 18 December 2002, here.
Figured out the WAL command, other bugs fixed. 19 December 2002, here.
Bots now respawn on death. 20 December 2002, here.
Fixed some bugs. 20 December 2002, here.
Bots can fire their weapons now. Apply the latest game patches first. 21 December 2003, here.
Added the VisServer tools, 21 December 2002, here.
Added the Path Marker mutator, 21 December 2002, here.
Can set bot names now, using the INIT command. 22 December 2002, here.
Can now spawn as any pawn class, using the "Class" specifier in the INIT command, 25 December 2002, here.
Cleaned up code some, 08 February 2003, here.
Fixed the spawn twice bug, 08 February 2003, here.
Fixed some more bugs. ROTATE and TURNTO commands now work, 10 February 2003, here.
TURNTO rotation now sets the pitch properly, 15 February 2003, here.

Gamebots Tips

To have BotAPI show up in UnrealEd, and the command line ucc tool, you need to add it to the list of packages loaded by Unreal. Edit UnrealTournament.ini in the System directory of Unreal, and add the following line to the [Editor.EditorEngine] section:
```
EditPackages=BotAPI
```
When using the plain BotAPI of Gamebots (not the wizard and goo version, FriendlyBotAPI), the levels start with 8 bots. To set this to 0, edit BotAPI.ini and add the following lines:
```
[Botpack.DeathMatchPlus]
MinPlayers=0
InitialBots=0
```

You can get the other features of the wizard and goo FriendlyBotAPI, such as no level changing, by dropping in this section instead:

[Botpack.DeathMatchPlus]
MinPlayers=0
AirControl=0.350000
bChangeLevels=False
bHardCoreMode=False
bMegaSpeed=False
bAltScoring=False
bTournament=False
NetWait=2
RestartWait=15
InitialBots=0

When running UT2003 on Windows, to prevent it from capturing your mouse when running in a window, change (in UT2003.ini):
```
CaptureMouse=True
```
to false.
You can take real screenshots of Unreal Tournament from inside of the game. According to http://www.3dspotlight.com/tweaks/UTFAQ/index.shtml#How3:

By default you can press the F9 key to take a screenshot. The screen capture is saved in the Unreal Tournament\System folder & is named shot00x.bmp, where x is a number from 0 - 9. These numbers are determined based on how many shots you currently have taken in the System directory.

To add a mutator to your UT command line, simply use the following syntax:

ucc server dm-Serpentine?game=BotAPI.BotDeathMatch?mutator=BotAPI.PathMarkerMutator

If you're a die-hard Linux user like myself, you are generally out of luck when building UT code. The UnrealEd editor only runs on Windows, and the compiler tool, while command line, has never been ported from Windows either.

You can, however, run the Windows dedicated server version of UT 2003 on Linux, using the Wine utility. This not only gives you access to the "make" commandlet, but you can even run the entire server if you really wanted (you don't, trust me).

Therefore, download and unzip the Windows dedicated server. Then, you can 'cd' into the System directory and run UCC like so:
```
wine UCC.exe make
```
And your UT packages will be compiled. Email me if you want more information.
If you're using Linux, you can keep your copies of both the full version and the dedicated server version of UT 2003 up to date mostly automatically. Simply run the ut2003/updater/update program, as the user who installed the game. The program is pretty easy to follow, and will automatically download patches, checksum them, and install them. Be sure to rub this bit of information into the noses of any Windows UT 2003 fans you may encounter :-)
If you're using UT 2003, stay up to date with the patches. I cannot stress this enough, as the many bugs in the game are slowly being addressed by Epic. For example, the Gamebots originally spawned with no weapons, which caused me all sorts of grief, but this is fixed now.
When using UnrealEd, you may notice that right click no longer gives you a menu when you click on the viewports. If you open the UnrealEd log window, you'll see a lot of "Fire" and "AltFire" lines when you left and right click, respectively, as seen here. After much grief, I finally traced down a tip on the Unreal Engine Wiki that said to turn off 3D anti-aliasing. For my NVIDIA drivers, I was able to use the system tray applet, like this. You don't need to restart UnrealEd for this to work either.
To turn off the annoying "Player entered the game" type messages when running a deathmatch, go to the UT 2003 settings and turn on "No Console Death Messages" under the "Game" tab. Here is a screenshot.
If you want to secure your UT 2003 server against dorm room losers, but don't want to bother with passwords and that kind of junk, there is an easy fix. Provided that you use packages that are not distributed with UT 2003 by default, you can simply edit the UT2003.ini file to prevent people from being able to download packages from the server on connect. In the [IpDrv.TcpNetDriver] section of the file, change the first line from:
```
AllowDownloads=True
```
To:
```
AllowDownloads=False
```
If you're tired of the spinning NVIDIA logo when you start UT2003, get rid of it by modifying your UT2003.ini file:
```
LocalMap=NvidiaLogo.ut2
```
To:
```
LocalMap=Entry.ut2
```
This will give you a black screen on startup. Hit Esc to get a menu.
To automatically connect to a server as a spectator, use the command:
```
ut2003 127.0.0.1?spectatoronly=true?quickstart=true
```
To take movies of your Unreal sessions, try the Fraps utility.

This is a port of Jeff Jacobson's CaveUT to Linux. CaveUT is a modification to the Unreal Tournament video game, which allows you to use multiple screens attached to a single Unreal Tournament instance, to simulate 3D immersion.

Using ModSAF to Control Unreal Tournament Bots

ModSAF is "an interactive, high resolution, entity level simulation that represents combined arms tactical operations up to the battalion level." Basically, it is a simulation system that lets the military play with their toys, without actually killing anybody in the process.

My research group is interested in making Unreal Tournament a viewer into a ModSAF simulation. This would allow anyone with a PC running the game to watch a simulation unfold, from any viewpoint. The eventual goal is to also allow Unreal Tournament to control entities in the ModSAF simulation.

I have written a proof of concept for the idea. It makes use of Gamebots, a package written to explore artificial intelligence using Unreal Tournament, and a collection of java classes from DIS-Java-VRML Working Group.

We're currently porting this to the Retsina agent system, in an effort to consolidate the work from several different research groups spread around a few universities.

Most of the models used come from the wonderful AirFight UT mod. These guys are just amazing!

View some screenshots.

View our local mirror of the DIS data dictionary, and the DIS PDU entity type listing.