Bot Building

So you’ve whipped your way through the single-player game and you’re curious to know if you can customize the bots of Quake III Arena. Well, not only can you customize them, but you can completely create, from the ground up, your own custom bots! Now you can fill the mean streets of Q3A with bots that use only grenades, bots that chat until they’re blue in the face, bots that are killers with the railgun — anything you’d like. Just follow this easy bot tutorial and you’re on your way to building your very own Q3A bots!

Update: Well, I’ve got the e-mail to prove that people are interested in this thing. I’m still getting multiple letters a day with questions and comments and I appreciate all of it. Fact is, I just don’t have the time to do this thing up right anymore. I know I’ve been promising all of you that I would update and finish the tutorial, but I just can’t do it at the moment. Sorry to let all you guys (and gals) down, but Real Life gets in the way like that sometimes.

This page will be kept up as a basic guide and reference until Hellchick or PQ decide to get rid of it. I do still have plans to finish it, but I don’t see when I’ll be able to. This being the case, here’s a little tidbit for you to know before I go…

In the part on chat editing, I erroneously stated that the ‘~’ symbol allows for words to be replaced in a sentence. It is actually quite the opposite. The ‘~’ symbol, when placed before a word in the bot’s chat text, will keep that word from being randomly replaced by the bot’s list of synonyms. More on this in the future, hopefully. If nothing else, I’ll at least make an effort to explain botchat to people before giving up on the tutorial totally. Keep an eye out, but don’t hold your breath.

  • Introduction
  • Part I: Getting Started
  • Part II: What’s in a bot?
  • Part III: Adding a bot, models, or skins
  • Part IV: Building your very own Hornybot
  • Part V: Teaching your bot to talk
  • Part VI: All the King’s horses and all the King’s men — putting it all together
  • Part VII: Adding files to a “zipped” pak0.pk3
  • FAQ