Maes

Well, to be fair XP and Vista wouid be 5.1 and 6.0 ( as per the "ver" command) and Windows 2000 would be 5.0. There's a Windows Server 2003, but no idea which would be "2001". Maybe XP, again? The explanation for skipping 9 was that a lot of software checked only the first letter of the OS version, so there would be misidentification with Windows 95 and 98.

So that's what health bonuses really are...

It doesn't involve rectally insertable computers (AFAIK), so why would it be?

And shotgun cartridges that somehow magically turn to shit and shoot only 3 pellets when in the sergeants' hands. And yet, nobody liked it when they finally fixed that (with chaingunners).

I wonder, if the goal is made to be "die as less as possible" or "maximize K:D ratio", will be AI evolve into a sophisticated camper/snaker? :-p What if you have a whole bunch of such AIs in the same map? Will they all simply sit it out?

Such AI models are known as "hybrid models", with the "traditional" logic taking exactly the role you described: if you have something that already works and it makes more sense to just shoehorn it in, somehow, instead of having to re-learn it from scratch, then why not? Especially if the application in hand is a real-world engineering one, not something that can be trained and trained and trained in an academic setting. At a certain point concrete results will be demanded...and nothing beats some old shoestring and bubblegum when it comes to that, amirite? IMO, that's not the goal here. For one, there's the screen scraping overhead and constraining the bot to interact through what is essentially a handicapping bottleneck. If one wanted to be super-efficient at outsmarting conventional bots, the starting point would be full access to the game's status just like they have. But not just to e.g. fire with superhuman accuracy over extreme ranges, but also to track the position, weapon & ammo status of opponents, proximity to chokepoints or weapon spamming zones etc.

So, does that mean that in theory it would be more vulnerable vs long-range attacks or fighting vs camouflaged opponents? Doesn't that impede map exploration/scouting, e.g. discovering a partially hidden weapon that might be visible only as a single pixel? Is the low resolution necessary in order to keep the screen-scraping overhead low? How much is it, BTW? Edit: new questions popped into my mind, if you don't mind my inquisitiveness ;-) Focusing more on the screen scraping/visual interface part, exactly how does it track and recognize opponents? E.g. it is trained to recognize only the general shape of Doomguy or to shoot at anything that moves? Is it trained to only track e.g. green Doomguy sprites, or is the tracking purely edge/shape based? What if you use a wall texture that looks just like Doomguy? Will it blindly attack it, or dismiss it due to lack of movement? And can the latter be exploited if an opponent sits perfectly still and only shoots at you when you have your back turned?

Well, the thickness of a wild boar's skull and its resistance to even shotgun slugs (let alone to buckshot) is legendary among Greek hunters (due to local regulations, they cannot hunt with anything but smoothbore shotguns). I can only imagine a bison's skull to be even more resistant, let alone an undead floating one from Hell.

Assuming the sprites are all in the same scale, they'd be quite a large skull IRL: Pretty much like shooting at flying bison heads. Can't imagine those going down in 2-3 hits either.

Uhhh, actually it does, but not in an immediately obvious way. In general, low health/low tier monsters invite players to spam them liberally, since "Hey, they are weak, and not even noobs should have trouble with them, amirite or amirite?". But massing those weak monsters also creates a massive damage potential, if not checked. So for every 30 HP of damage that you don't deal e.g. to a shotgunner, there's potentially 45 HP worth of hot, manly lead waiting to be pumped deeply in you :-) Of course a lot depends on the tactical situation. Being stuck in a room with 100 shotgunners might be better or worse than being stuck with a single cyberdemon or 10 revenants (same total HP) depending on cover, weaponry etc. Plus there's all that Glass Cannon, Mighty Glacier etc. stuff. Most monsters with higher HP than the Revenant pretty much fall in the Mighty Glacier/Bullet Sponge category, and per-attack damage plateaus quickly. Imagine if e.g. the Baron had the same damage: health ratio as the Imp...ouch ;-) The Revenant sits in a kind of perverse "sweet spot", so to speak.

Oh c'mon, at least the Caco Is right... I admit I fux0r3d up the Lost Soul's maximum damage: it's the same as the Imp's. Old habits die hard..."Lost Souls do the same damage as single bullets", said the Unofficial Doom FAQ v6.666 ages ago :) For the rest, don't flatter yourself.

Any map where revenants can get caught in infighting with Cacos, HKs or even Barons. All those monsters may out-health the Revs, but if they infight and the exchange is mostly projectiles, then the Rev has the edge thanks both to its higher average damage, and its higher accuracy. Even in a melee not all is lost: its attack speed is higher than that of HKs and Barons, and he may win simply by painchanging them. It's not unusual for HKs to lose regularly to a single Rev, one on one, and even a Baron may take quite a disproportionate punishment before managing to deal those 300 HP and put the Rev down. Against 2 Revs, a single Baron will simply be mugged/gang raped. And speaking of gangs... ...if Revs were a brawling game character, they'd be a kind of tall, lean and mean street fighter gangstah, a switchblade-flipping, "bad mothafuckah" ruthless, "street smart" kind of tough guy that has many tricks up his sleeve. Not the top of the bunch in overall stats, but definitively among the toughest, never to be underestimated. Barons and HK would be just "dumb muscle" in comparison, like body builders that are strong but not as "street smart" as the tough guy. Now, when you face an entire gang/army of such guys.... Just like in the case of Chaingunners, there are other things to keep into consideration. Yeah, their damage/hp ratio is shit...or rather, if you flip it around, it's pretty damn high (100:15), in the bullet sponge leagues. Not Baron kind of high (900:60) but, interestingly, the same as a Cacodemon (400:60). What makes it annoying is that since it's a melee monster, it will tend to corner and surround the player, and once it lands a successful attack, it's almost immediately ready for another. Unlike other melee monsters, it's not enough to simply break contact, since it can charge faster than most projectiles, and those bullet-level damages can quickly add up.

Exactly. Only scrubs/noobs complain, dontchaknow?

A good metric for "monster hatred" is the Damage:Health ratio for various monsters. For example, for imps it would be 24:60, which is the highest for a classic projectile + melee monster, but for shotgun guys it would be 45:30, making it the only monster that can deal more damage than its own health in a single shot. For Revs it would be 80:300, but in practice those guys can and often do deal more damage than their own health before going down. If a Rev lands 4 hits at 80 damage, it already dealt more than its own health. A classic example of this is a HK vs Rev infight. Think a one-on-one between those two monsters is a no-brainer? Will the HK's higher health always save it from death vs a more damaging and more accurate opponent (PROTIP: the Rev will miss less, esp. at a distance)? For chaingunners, it's a bit more complicated, as their per-shot damage isn't any higher than that of a zombieman (15 HP), so the ratio would be 15:70. However, in practice they will never land just a single shot, and most often they will be at least as damaging as a shotgunner at point blank, if not more. Then, the ratio can skyrocket.

Does it also have obligatory Pinky/Spectre chainsaw massacres upon picking up the chainsaw? If so, I'm game.