The totally unthinkable has happened – it’s like it’s raining cupcakes or something. Turns out Valve has been secretly developing AI-controlled bots for Team Fortress 2, the game that was supposed to be impossible to develop AI-controlled bots for. Well, boggle my brainbox.
“With the success of the AI systems of Left 4 Dead, we’ve been continuing to develop these technologies to create new kinds of game experiences,” writes Mike Booth on the TF2 blog. “Team Fortress 2 is an excellent ‘sandbox’ for explorations of this sort, and we’ve been quietly doing so for much of this last year. Some of the results of these explorations are TF ‘bots’ — AI-driven player proxies with simulated humanlike senses, reaction times, and tactics. Although the TFBots are not yet complete, they play a pretty decent game of King of the Hill.”
So until they grasp the subtleties of multiple point capture and cart pushing, they’re currently only available to deploy on koth_viaduct, koth_sawmill, and koth_nucleus. Just like regular human players, TFBots also require open player slots on the server to drop into the game. Valve’s not yet chucked together any sort of formal interface for this, so you’re doing it manually for now:
To add bots to your game, use the console command tf_bot_add. This will drop a random bot onto a random team (assuming there is a free player slot). The tf_bot_add command can also take up to three optional arguments: , , and , in any order. For example, tf_bot_add 10 will add 10 random bots to the game with auto-assigned teams. Typing tf_bot_add pyro blue will add a Pyro to the blue team. Entering tf_bot_add red 5 will add 5 random bots to the red team. The command tf_bot_add red 3 heavyweapons will add three heavies to the red team.
In order to put specific bots on specific teams (for a bots-vs-humans game, for example), you may want to disable automatic team balancing. To do this, enter mp_autoteambalance 0 followed by mp_teams_unbalance_limit 0.
To remove a bot, use the console command kick . To remove all of the bots in the game, use the command tf_bot_kick all.