NPCs as characters

[peter1234123]

Has anyone heard of this? It's an interesting concept and I've looked around and couldn't find anything about this... but I was wondering if it would be possible to program NPCs to act as characters in PVP instances, for a more...real PVP experience, if anyone has any information regarding this idea, please post back.

[seanb]

So you wanna make an AI bot to fill out the ranks of an underpopulated PVP game?

Nope, I think you are on your own there.

[NickoNiklas]

Search for "playerbot" in this forum,

the closest thing I can think of.

[Unkle Nuke]

It would require scripting the behavior for the AI. At the least, each class would require scripting specific to their abilities. You may also consider racial AI for any special race abilities, like the Gnome's "escape artist" or the Undead's "cannibalize".

Playerbot, which can be found in the Core Mods section here, also has AI scripts for each character class, but it's purpose is for assisting a player instead of PvP. I would certainly make it a point to have a look at these before you begin work on PvP AIs. Playerbot now has its own forums for larger scale development. You can find the site address recently posted in the topic.

In addition, I'd highly recommend you make inquiries at the ScriptDev2 forums. Those guys have been scripting NPC behavior for a while and have gotten quite good at it. You can also find a great many good examples there.

You'll need to be fluent with C++ and the MaNGOS EventAI to get started.