How to add bots to maps

[PhaI]

There's a tutorial made by a well-known Battlefield singleplayer modder on how to add bots to multiplayer-only maps using Botinator, his website has been long defunct and the tutorial is really hard to find nowadays, which is why I want to link it in this place for anyone interested in using this method for adding basic bot support.

For this to work you will have to get the Botinator 0.5

BF Botinator v0.5 - BF-Games.net

www.bf-games.net

The tutorial itself, archived on the Internet archive

Botinator 5 Tutorial

Also, if you want to have basic bot support for the stock maps which do not support it without going through the trouble of doing this, there have been some coop patches floating around for a long time. Just extract the rar/Zip files, put the RFA files in your levels folder, for example C:\Program Files (x86)\EA GAMES\Battlefield Vietnam\mods\BFVietnam\archives\levels and you'll be able to play the maps in coop and singleplayer.

Saigon 1968: https://www.bf-games.net/downloads/722/saigon-1968-coop.html
Fall of Saigon: https://www.bf-games.net/downloads/2831/fall-of-saigon-coop-patch-from-12.html
Defense of Con Thien: https://www.bf-games.net/downloads/598/defense-of-con-thien-coop.html
Operation Cedar Falls: https://www.bf-games.net/downloads/1929/operation-cedar-falls-coop.html

 

[DenalDouglas]

I recommend against using Botinator unless you know a lot about how bots work. The program was never finished, and apart from doing the work of implementing the basic framework of bot support in a map, it actually gets more wrong than it does right. It makes mistakes that, while they won't crash the game, will prevent the bots from working as well as they should. There are many, many things it does that you have to go into the map file and change manually in order to truly make the bots effective. You also need the debugging program, which doesn't come with the game (but admittedly is easy to find), to generate pathmaps, or you'll have bots running into every obstacle in their path. If you add bot support to a map with infantry spawns inside a building, they'll be stuck inside and can't move. I think that's actually a major problem specifically with the singleplayer patch for Saigon-1968 that you posted above. All in all, Botinator is more of a mid/advanced-level tool for modders, not the beginner-friendly tool it was meant to be and which it might have been if it was finished.

There's also the problem that even if you add singleplayer support to a map, bots don't use the new vehicles from patches 1.1 and later (OH-6, Ka-25, Nancy, BM-21 Cargo, etc.) very well, and in certain cases can even cause a game crash. I've been working on patches for these four maps that both add singleplayer support and make it possible for bots to use these vehicles skillfully and with no crashes, but I've run into trouble with the fixes tripping BfVietnam's content check and making the maps unplayable in multiplayer. I have a possible solution, but I haven't tested it yet. If there's demand for these maps to be made available with proper bot support, I could have another try at it.

 

[PhaI]

You bring up some very good points, I am myself a novice to singleplayer modding and think it can be useful to provide a good base to be built upon, even if one has to revise lots and lots of things after running it and figure things out as one goes along. I think if some time in the future you should be able to create a stable mod with all the vehicles working that would be awesome, particularly if it was possible to have the singleplayer versions to the Helloclan installer in the future as an optional feature to be chosen when installing the game. I also knew the maps I linked were flawed, but not aware it was to such an extent. Again, thank you for providing invaluable insights regarding this topic.

 

[DenalDouglas]

Happy to help. And I do have a good bit of spare time available right now, so I might take another look at those patches soon. The good thing is that if I can make them work the way I want, they wouldn't even have to be done as a separate mod, just extra files that could be added to the base game but wouldn't affect online play. And actually, Battlefield Singleplayer Creator is a slightly better tool to use compared to Botinator. It's not as user-friendly as Botinator, but it does a better job. I've got a comprehensive tutorial around somewhere that I wrote that explains how to use it.

 

[Crash]

I'm a fairly advanced Battlecraft user (42/DCF not vietnam at least not yet) but I'm scared to use botinator.


View: https://youtu.be/SNFPxqZ1XUg