TF2 bots?

I found this note on Planet Fortress:

TF2: Bots

Remember how much better Half-Life's AI was compared to the FPS's before it? How those guys would flank you, and if they didn't know where you were, flush you out with grenades.

Steve Bond, the lead AI guru behind the vicious enemies in Half-Life, will be the point man for the bot's AI in TF2. The base concept that the AI will be built off of is a "learning design," (the artificial combatants learn from their mistakes and successes.) A great example of this is the engineer bot, "he" will build sentry guns and then track the amount of time until each is destroyed, how many kills it achieved, where the enemy is, and so forth. After building sentry guns in a variety of locations, the bot will "learn" what works and what doesn't, and then will pick the best location for its defenses almost every time.

This learning AI is interesting because it will be incorporated into every players' individual games as well, charting their success and offering suggestions onscreen to improve their play. As players improve, the ghost bot will offer fewer and fewer pointers.

Teams will be able to practice against teams of bots, and bots can be used to round out teams short on members. Should a new player log on, one of the bots will drop out to make room; conversely, players who drop out of games will be replaceable by bots. In addition to that, a player could fill both teams with bots, and become commander of one team, thus having a true RTS game (ala Starcraft/CNC/ect).

For commander bots: there will be a bot able to control a team of bots so a player can take on a team completely comprised by the computer. Taking that a step further, the commander bot will also be able to command a team of human players.

I don't have TF2 (hopefully for Christmas....), so I don't know if there actually are bots, but this looks promising!

It has bots, the problem is they don't exactly work :P. The best you can do is set them to mimic you.

To activate them you HAVE to use sv_cheats 1, then just type bot and enter then bot_mimic 1.

I hope they will add real bots but this is what we are offered so far.

Botting TF2, while also making the game playable at a reasonable level, would probably be the most time consuming and difficult AI in game history.

It certainly can be done, but I don't think Valve will even try. I think if Valve had ever intended for bots to be included in the existing version of the game, they would have been in from the start. I would guess that that article is probably in reference to an older version of TF2 that would have been due out years ago - the game did spend almost a decade in development.