Skip to content

Discourage bots from pathing through deadly areas#1739

Merged
sunzenshen merged 2 commits into
NeotokyoRebuild:masterfrom
sunzenshen:bot-avoid-death-areas
Mar 1, 2026
Merged

Discourage bots from pathing through deadly areas#1739
sunzenshen merged 2 commits into
NeotokyoRebuild:masterfrom
sunzenshen:bot-avoid-death-areas

Conversation

@sunzenshen

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Contributor

Description

Add a small pathing penalty to the NavArea a bot was killed at. Over the course of a match, bots will try other paths that have fewer occurrences of deaths. Intended to emulate players trying different map traversal strategies as they learn a map.

Toolchain

  • Windows MSVC VS2022

Related Work

@sunzenshen

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Contributor Author

Primarily to address the feedback that bots are predictable given a similar set of circumstances, such as a repeated ghost spawn location.

Especially in modes like TDM, bots tend to take the same direct paths in order to path towards various points of interest like spawn points or ghost spawns:

Screenshot 2026-02-25 211237

With this PR, eventually bots will start to avoid extremely wide open kill zones, and gradually use paths that have some extra length cost but less death penalty, which emerges as bots taking routes with more cover:

Screenshot 2026-02-25 211758

One way to verify the effects of the PR is to greatly increase neo_bot_path_reservation_killed_penalty to values of 100 or more. With such a large penalty, bots conspicuously avoid areas to the point where they will climb obstacles to avoid an area (so an excessively large value can be problematic). Initial testing of just 10 points of penalty appear to be enough to gradually shift the paths over a course of a match.

@sunzenshen
sunzenshen requested a review from a team February 26, 2026 04:49
@sunzenshen sunzenshen added the Bots Related to bot players label Feb 26, 2026
@sunzenshen
sunzenshen force-pushed the bot-avoid-death-areas branch from c7a37d0 to 3c5b4b6 Compare February 27, 2026 09:38
@Rainyan
Rainyan requested a review from a team February 28, 2026 23:12
@sunzenshen
sunzenshen merged commit e880b08 into NeotokyoRebuild:master Mar 1, 2026
7 checks passed
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

Bots Related to bot players

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

3 participants