AI Misbehaving

   So far, the few bot tutorials that I've seen have seemed to consist entirely of:

       Run BSPC on your compiled .bsp to create a bot navigation (.aas) file.

       The End.

   Ah, if only it were that simple.....

Unless you are extremely lucky or your map is one box with a rocket launcher and a spawn point in it, the bots will probably play really dumb. Worse still, you may encounter 'bot stutter' - an uneven framerate caused by CPU overload on the bot AI. Now its very easy to say "well, this map is designed for human players anyway so I'll leave it" but the sad fact of the matter is that its quite unlikely that your map will end up on any servers, so its worth making the botplay as good as possible. Happily there are several things that can be done to improve matters, and this tutorial is here to tell you what they are. However, before we start there are a few things bots will never, or hardly ever, do:

   a) Bots will not usually shoot at a shootable trigger or button.

   b) Bots will not press a button voluntarily (although you can make them using an item_botroam - but these are not conditional, so the bot will carry on trying to activate the button even if it isn't necessary, and/or won't go for it above anything else when it is necessary)

   c) Bots are pretty rubbish at working out jumps and even worse at working out rocket jumps and strafe jumps. If an area of your map can only be reached by jumping don't be surprised if you can't get the bots to use it.
   d) Bots will only try to get floating items (those flagged as 'suspended') by using jump-pads and launch-ramps. They won't jump or deliberately fall off a ledge to get a suspended item