OfflineBots.md

Offline Bots

Offline Bots ara available in the Offline Play state.

To create a Bot, you need to have a class that implements the IJUMPBot interface.

Note, that a bot is also a player, so the IJUMPBot implements also the 'IJUMPPlayer' interface.

JUMP will create automatically as many bots as the number of players in the game (JUMPOptions.NumPlayers) minus one for your human player.

Note: a mix of online players and bots is not supported, you can only have one human player and the rest bots.

Offline play

To start the offline play with bots, set the BotTypeName property with the class name of the bot you want to use and then call the OfflinePlay method, when you are in the Master stage.

This will create a list of Bots and trigger the OnOfflinePlayConnect event.

At this point you want to load a scene with a JUMPMultiplayer object in OfflinePlay stage.

The client will receive snapshot and you can send commands, like in the online Play stage, but in this case, your bots will be invoked and will be sending commands to the server.

You can very easily have a single play scene that handles online and offline play, all you need to do is have a JUMPMultiplayerPlay and a JUMPMultiplayerOfflinePlay prefabs (disabled) in the play scene, then in the Activate function, check the JUMPMultiplayer.IsOfflinePlay property and just set active the relevant one - see the DiceRoller sample for an example.

Writing a Bot

To facilitate writing engaging Bots, they have full access to the state of the game. Bots don't use the snapshot, but get a pointer to your Engine, where you usually store your game state, and a Tick from the server:

public interface IJUMPBot : IJUMPPlayer
{
	void Tick(double ElapsedSeconds);

	IJUMPGameServerEngine Engine { get; set; }
}

In the Tick event, you want to access the state on your Engine and have your bots behave accordingly.

In the DiceRoller sample, for example, the Bot simply rolls a 3 every three seconds. Note that you can access (DiceRollerEngine) Engine and have full access to your state, for example you want your bot to try and catch up with the player and have a higher chance to roll a high number if the bot is behind.