Kwazy Wabbit Ideas: Bot Spawning?

[nbohr1more]

I've been pretty well behaved these days and my foolish speculations have not veered too far into the twilight zone but I have recently become more interested in the topic of Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) and it's future implications for Id Tech 4.

 

From my understanding, The Dark Mod uses "Boost" libraries to take advantage of an existing body of work with regard to C++ library support. When I began to delve into some of the newer Boost features I stumbled upon "Boost.Thread" which is apparently a special case "Thread spawning library". This has sparked my curiosity about whether there is any way to "farm out" threads through invoking this library or invoking another DLL that contains this library.

 

After a little Doom3world searching, I came across an old thread where soon after Doom 3's release a modder had decided to "Fake Client Bots"

 

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=9940&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

 

1) Is this still possible?

2) Could this "Bot spawning" be pinned to different CPU cores?

3) Is it even possible to use the Boost Thread library to avoid such a cumbersome workaround?

 

So... I'm probably so short of clues here that my progeny will be in "clue debt" long after my passing...

 

Commence with the scolding

[Aprilsister]

What does TDM want with bots?

[nbohr1more]

Rather than have the AI all sharing time-slices of the same CPU core, you might be able to grant Bots the same AI and have them run on separate CPU cores. They would access the game as if they were human players in a multi-player match.

 

(Edit: mangled sentence fragment...)

Edited November 29, 2010 by nbohr1more

[Aprilsister]

So you basically want to know if Boost.Thread allows the caller to assign the thread to a particular CPU core?

[nbohr1more]

That would be one of many questions...

 

The main one being, "Can a single-threaded application running in Windows call a DLL that spawns threads then returns the result "serialized" or does the core application always need to know how many threads are invoked (or some other syntax restriction that prevents parallel threads from touching a single threaded application)?

 

Would the above require another executable in addition to the DLL?

 

If it is possible to do such a thing but AI path-finding is buried in the closed source portion of the code, then could you bypass this path-finding and make the AI think they are seeing a simple path by externally solving the path-finding then modifying the AI path perception with the result?

 

If it's not possible to thread as above could you still create an external AI Bot that interacts with Doom 3's multi-player net-code and has all the capabilities of a native AI?

 

I have always thought that SMP was currently impossible but there a things like that D3W link that are making me reconsider my assumptions.

 

Just curiosity...

 

Edit:

 

This document makes it seem so tantalizingly possible...

 

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_37_0/doc/html/thread/thread_management.html

Edited November 29, 2010 by nbohr1more

[Ishtvan]

That sounds interesting, but you'd have to add multiplayer support to TDM first. We didn't make maintaining D3 multiplayer support a priority, and therefore many TDM things (e.g., frobbing) would be broken if there were more than one client connected.

[nbohr1more]

Yeah, the bot idea is probably too much work given how close GPL is.

 

That boost.thread thing OTOH, looks like it can obfuscate the threads in a function so the core executable won't even know it's calling threads:

 

This allows the details of thread creation to be wrapped in a function.

 

(there has to be some gotha to this though...)

[OrbWeaver]

We already use Boost.Threads internally as I understand it, also I think Doom 3 itself provides threading, for example in script functions. So I don't think whatever Massive Hidden Potential you're imagining really exists.

[nbohr1more]

That has sparked my curiosity further I'm afraid...

 

Time to read more about Boost Threads...

 

Thanks!

[ungoliant]

well, everyone needs a hobby, right?