How to get silly bots into a level

This short and basic tutorial discusses how to get bots into your game via the console and the rudimentary "aiPlayer" class provided with the latest engine release. It also lets your bots run around in your level. Not much, though, but enough to get you started and to save you from your "in-game-solitude" ;-)
It's basically a summary of different forum threads I found here, and I thought it would be helpful to concentrate it into a little tutorial for Torque newbies - just like me... :-) Here we go ...

First of all, import the two files
\engine\game\aiPlayer.h
\engine\game\aiPlayer.cc

into the MSVC project, if they aren't already in there! Compile the example project.
Then, load any example level. Open the console by pressing ^ and type in the following:

$myBot01 = aiAddPlayer("Bill Gates");


You should get something like this as result:
CADD: 1426 ai:local
I've been added

The bot should spawn at any of the spawn spheres in the level, maybe you have to walk around to find him... ;-)


After that, you can access your bot through the global variable $myBot01. Go ahead and try it with:

echo($myBot01.getClassName());

which should give you the "answer"
AIPlayer


By the way, if you'd like to see all fields and methods of your (aiPlayer) classes, just type

$myBot01.dump();


You can make your bot move like this:
$myBot01.setMoveDestination("-224.153 -166.305 214.662");
$myBot01.move();

which lets your bot run to the specified coordinates.
Of course, you can also pass the values of other bots/objects:

$myBot02 = aiAddPlayer("Psycho");
$myBot02.setMoveDestination($myBot01.getMoveDestination());
$myBot02.move();

which lets the new Psycho-Bot run at the location of your first bot...

To have your bots do more advanced stuff like fighting or drinking beer ;-), you'd have to implement your own routines (e.g. pathfinding) for now, because the aiPlayer class is work in progress right now ... If I got time to work on that and finish it before somebody else does, that's definitely something for a second part of this tutorial... :-)

You should probably set up all this in a script and play around with it for a while... Maybe you could write some functions to make some bots "escort" your player by updating their positions with your players' moves, etc. ... just go for it! And then, of course, have them attack each other, mount vehicles, hunt your player, funny stuff like that... ;-)

If you want some more, make sure you read the 2nd part of this tutorial!