Gamebots was a mod started by individuals at USC-ISI. Andrew Scholer was instrumental in the first release for Unreal Tournament. The mod then underwent revision with the addition of "non-violent art" at CMU with Gal Kaminka. The Source Forge site for this version exists here. The RIT versions do not include the non-violent art due to problems with the model animations.

John Manolovich partially ported the code to UT2003 as can be seen from the UT2003 port page.

Jessica Bayliss at RIT first used the UT Gamebots mod in early 2003 for her Game AI course. Several bugs in the original version were fixed and extensive refactoring took place in order to reduce the redundancy in several class hierarchies. This was done to make the code base a little more maintainable.

In Winter of 2005 Jessica and Tim Garwood fully finished the UT2003 and UT2004 ports. The UT2004 server has a superset of the original message protocol and so UT bots work in UT2004 now. In the future, Jessica would like to completely overhaul the protocol for more efficiency.

Gamebots Server

The UT/UT2003/UT2004 documentation states the following: "Your mods must be distributed solely for free, period. Neither you, nor any other person or party, may sell them to anyone, commercially exploit them in any way, or charge anyone for receiving or using them without prior written consent of Epic Games Inc. You may exchange them at no charge among other end-users and distribute them to others over the Internet, on magazine cover disks, or otherwise for free."

The original authors of the mod prefer BSD licensing. Remember that if you wish to resell the software you would need to obtain permission from Epic.

Gamebots Clients

All Gamebots Client code is copyrighted by RIT and is released under the GPL license .