[poll] Bots in 4.0

KanxeR, Tue Jun 12 2007, 04:54AM

So tonight I witnessed for the first time, a bot user in UT. We always joke about it and hear about accounts from other people who've seen it, well tonight I saw it first hand. I've seen similar bots in Q3 vanilla, so maybe it was the same flavor. You guys know I'm not a noob. I'm fully convinced these two guys were botting, take it for what it's worth.

This account may be obvious to those who've seen (used?) them, but here's my story anyway.

We were playing on the WTG? pure server - no PB. Two players, 'iownu' and 'champion' were playing with both 250 pings. They said they were on TS, but I suspect they were on the same LAN next to each other. Both were at the top of the team in points in the full 24 player server. When the server thinned out, a couple of people went spec. They voted to kick the specs for no apparent reason. The reason was obvious to me later on. One thing that was very strange is they both disconnected together after each map. I don't know if this was intentional or a 'feature'. After watching both of them go on unbelievable shooting sprees, I went spec. The first thing I noticed was shortly after going spec and chasing them, iownu's mouse pointed straight up to zenith. During this time he was playing well and I didn't see anything unusual. He's a decent player mind you, but no crazy shooting sprees. Then about 5 minutes into it, on respawning his mouse went straight up to zenith again. His mouse sensitivity was definitely much higher, to a point where he was really whipping around the screen. Then came the sprees... His crosshair would whip across the screen, dead on target (accounting for his 250 ping) and almost every single shot fired was on. Then with a target down, his crosshair would whip around to another target, dead on then target down. I'm not talking about mad UT skills, he was doing 180's right on target and the crosshair was a solid lock (not wandering a little as it normally should). I didn't say anything to him, figured there wasn't anything to do about it, and that was that.

So here's my hypothesis on how I think this thing works. It's either scriptable or command line executable and can be turned on/off easily in game. The mouse jump to zenith is a default position when he turns it on/off. The bot has the ability to track a target on key bind, where the user decides to fire. When active it tracks the closest target and looks-ahead dependent on ping. I have no idea how it might do this, as I would think the look-ahead would need to be consistent and calibrated. Perhaps it sets an artificially higher ping to meet those conditions.

Anyway, thought I'd like to share my story. Yes, I should have demo'd, but I got the command wrong and thought it was recording. What's the command anyway in UT?

Anyone else got bot stories/theories?