The important thing to realize is that for Quake bots, being "good" was not always preferred. Some of the early generation bots (Reaper IIRC) were wicked good because they had perfect aim and could easily defeat a human without ever relying on strategy, which was rather poor at the time. They were ok as shooting targets if you tuned it down but terrible to practice real deathmatch.
It took a while for good boys (like Frogbot IIRC) to emerge and provide a good deathmatch experience. And still a lot of them had to rely on manually defined, strategic routes around a map.
I'd love to see bots generating navigation meshes and "juicy" routes on the fly, maybe after analyzing gameplay, but I think Quake bots never got to that point. It was a bit too early.
If this were done, it would have to be an engine mod/engine bot or client/proxy bot, rather than the more limited quakec.
A key difference is this is rather interesting.
And this Quake bot genealogy would be utterly boring to 99%+ of people too.
I'm obviously the single person alive (except perhaps my brother) who finds all three interesting.
Edit: typo
But if I was about to inherit a lordship, or a large sum of money, or something like that then my interest would suddenly kindle.
The latter is the whole point of the lineage record, showing the lineage of messiah from king David, from Rahab, from Abraham, from Adam.
Stomped: https://web.archive.org/web/19961121230158/http://www.stompe...
Planet Quake: https://web.archive.org/web/19970414103422/http://www.planet...
ftp.cdrom.com (Walnut Creek!) idgames archive: https://www.gamers.org/ftp/idgames_info.html
Blue's News: https://web.archive.org/web/19970605010005/http://www.bluesn...
Shuga Shack: https://www.shacknews.com/article/123747/shacknews-turns-25-...
I'm sure you're already familiar with it, but I found The Cutting Room Floor very helpful in my research (e.g., https://tcrf.net/Proto:Quake/Qtest1).
I've started an "official release" archive along similar lines (includes qtest1 and many other goodies): https://github.com/Jason2Brownlee/QuakeOfficialArchive
Yeah, QC for most of the mods was available for extensions, only reaper was closed src where authors resorted to decompilers, at least that's the story that I've put together from research.
* TeamFortress Bot (Forthpick) standalone I think.
* TFBots (Nexus) on the bplayer line.
* Team Fortress Bots (coffee) on the tutor bot line.
* Frik-TF (Martineau) on the frikbot line.
I think the latter (Frik-TF) was the most recent and had the possibility of learning from the other releases.
Intersting there's no Frogbot TF in the mix. Maybe there is and I haven't found it yet...
I'm mainly testing the SP and DM bots, I've not tested any of the TF bots yet, sorry.
Edit: formatting.
Edit2: Coffee's tutor bot based TFBot has a newer 2003 timestamp on files in the zip. Might be the "latest" release.
You could train against it and improve very quickly.
However it also seemed to accelerate boredom with q1 multiplayer for me.
There was a hierarchy of ancestors, siblings and descendants. So, when a bug is discovered in a game, it was important to trace back its lineage to fix all relatives affected by it.
Finally my job was to convert all common code into a library so we could have versioned releases and be able to fix bugs just by upgrading the library version.
The copy/past was fast for the very few first games, afterwards was a pain in the ass. When I joined the situation was dire. But , it was an interesting study in evolution, thou.
