Okay... We are now going to briefly do a series of sourceport reviews... This is the first and will be the only one done this month... I am picking this particular one first to highlight one of the best doom community achievements ever... Namely, Autodoom...
Autodoom as a modded Eternity Based Sourceport that uses a bot to try to beat the map by itself, without player input. It mimicks the player, has a system of pre-generated bot nodes it uses to navigate any map on the fly, and for the most part can beat many of the "normal" (aka not ultra hard) maps it gets put in, provided you play it on easy.. It is not really good at Ultraviolence yet, but hopefully that will change soon.
How this bot is trained is a mystery to me, but the guy who made this thing did such a good thing with this that it destroys all other bots for doom by miles... I tried several zdoom bots, as zdoom mods don't work in this port, and many of them simply could not navigate a simple randomly generated map or even the original doom maps. And many of the above mentioned zdoom bots (I tried Zcajun, Doombot, TDBots and Zetabot) simply could not handle a randomizer mod and died a lot in the beginning of the first map..
This bot CREAMS its way through the same map and many others, provided you play on easy and use a dehacked patch... The one I provided makes the doom weapons faster, makes it so you start with 150 health, and makes it easier... But doesn't make it insanely easy either... It's not superwep.deh but it is less difficult to beat a map. With this dehacked patch, this bot destroys maps... I saw it pistol 2 revenants to death at the start of a map, failing to die, when its health dropped below 40. I saw it kick hell knight ASS in the next map and fight hordes of them with a chaingun and nothing else... This thing pwns enemies with plasma and the chaingun, as it's aim is perfect... It's knowledge of the map is also perfect, knowing where every secret is without having to research that crap. It often maxes levels on the first try.
It does have a few downsides. The first is that this bot is an eternity based bot. It simply will NOT lead ANY zdoom mod. None work, not even omgwpns that supposedly works in eternity, works in this. I got lucky and found a patch that adds in custom enemies/weapons in the place of original ones that works in vanilla and it works here well, but it sucks that this thing wasn't coded based on lzdoom or something better like that.
Another downside is based on this bots struggles with randomly generated maps. A lot of the time it beats them... But there are things it can't do and those things annoy me. Sometimes a pickup is put on the end of a narrow bridge with lava on either side... This messes up the bot and the bot falls in and can't get out 100% of the time. It also messes up with lifts a lot and god forbid it runs into switch triggered elevators that require keys. It will obsessively flip ALL switches on these elevators till the elevator fucks up and blocks the player 90% of the time... It aso messes up randomly on top of that and can't jump across chasms in any map... So forget about it doing map02 or map11 of doom 2 due to that... Besides these issues, it is amazing...
