Client Side Abilities

What can a client-side bot do?

Understanding what a client-side bot can do requires understanding to some extent how Quake works. Most of this information has been kicked around on newsgroups and other pages to a greater or lesser extent. Of course, hard won experience provides it to you now.

The single most important fact about Quake is it uses the BSP tree which describes a level not only to accelerate rendering, but to accelerate client-server communication. The key observation is that the server only needs to tell the client about all the entities that are visible to it, or more generally potentially visible to it, but the server never needs to tell the client about all the entities in the map.

The BSP tree divides the map into a set of leaves, each of which is about the size of a player. Some leaves are substantially larger, some are substantially smaller, but most importantly, there are a lot of them. Several hundred for a typical map. For each of these leaves the server knows what leaves are potentially visible from that leaf. That is, given that the player's viewpoint is anywhere in that leaf, looking in any direction, the server knows the set of leaves which the player might see. This is almost always a much smaller set of leaves than the entire map.

The server then uses this visibility information to tell the client about all the entities in the set of leaves potentially visible to the client. Thus a client can't track an enemy on the other side of the map, but a client can track an enemy which it cannot directly see, if it could see that enemy from somewhere in it's leaf node. This results in the interesting behavior that a shot can be led to hit an enemy as it rounds a distant corner, a shot an unassisted human could never make, barring just plain chance.

A number of people have complained that a client-side bot has 'eyes in the back of its head'. This is absolutely true. Why? Because one of the most effective ways to combat the perceptual effects of latency is to reduce rotational latency (moving your head around). Thus the server tells you about the entities behind you, so despite high ping times you can spin around and see them, target them, etc. quite responsively. Don't like it? Take our word for it, Quake would be unplayable on all but the very fastest, very lowest ping time servers without it. Don't think client-side quake bots should take advantage of it? That is a different question. We feel allowing client-side bots to use all of the information the server transmits to the best of their ability is entirely fair, and the only playing field that is level for all. This doesn't mean we think a client-side bot vs. unassisted human is necessarily a fair fight, it certainly isn't if you are playing us.

What can't a client-side bot do?

This is probably the most important question, since it tells you how we are and how we aren't cheating.

Quake is a client/server program, with a very clear division of labor between the client and the server.

Client

Draws the set of entities transmitted to it by the server, and sends periodic updates to the server about the client's input (facing direction, desired forward and transverse velocity, pressing the fire key, etc.).

Server

Receives updates from the clients and computes the physics/dynamics of the game. This includes determining how players actually move (the server tells the client its position, not vice versa), determining when shots hit, how much damage is done, who has what weapons, etc.

No matter how you slice it, we don't have the same advantages as a server-side bot. We can't run any faster than you. We can't magically become invincible. We can't jump any higher, fire any faster, our take a rocket to the face any better than any other player.