Sarcasm? Not the best counterexample, as that's how lots of bots work. The AI engine does not exclusively work by rendering the scene and attempting to visually identify targets.

Still, there has been a lack of outcry about the absence of a quake3 command line version. Because nobody needs it.

Hmm, would I use -e - or will it read from stdin if I don't supply -e?

How do I pipe to it?

I imagine you'd read from /dev/random, if you wanted to play as well as I do. All joking aside, I imagine that one could easily write a bot that allowed one to give it heuristics via STDIN or a command line parameter.

I doubt many would do it this way, but it would be consistent with the unix design ethos. One program would manage the Playing the Game and perhaps providing an API for interacting with the game, or even a pluggable section of games, and another would handle generating heuristics (or retrieving them).

Then you could, e.g.:

multibot -g quake3 --name "Rocket Llama" -h rockets.lua multibot -g quake3 --name "Ash" -h shotgun-only.lua cat /dev/urandom | multibot -g quake3 --name "Confused"

multibot -g civ3 --name "Dr. No" -h well-defended-island.lua multibot -g civ3 --name "Dr. Evil" -h meeeeelion.lua

That'd be a nightmare to implement, of course. :-)