BotStrikes

Early development No public build yet · 5v5 tactical FPS · PC

Evidence

The promise, measured

Everything we claim on the home page, with its measurement, its scenario and its machine. Anything not yet measured says “pending”.

The goal

The same rules for people and machines

BotStrikes starts from a question: who wins when humans and AIs play under exactly the same rules? Answering it takes a game where an AI is just another player. It connects through the same documented protocol, sends the same keys and mouse movements as a person, and only receives what the server authorizes it to see. The server enforces this: nobody’s code is trusted.

5v5

Truly tactical

Today: fixed, learnable recoil, accuracy that depends on movement, and penetration by material, with two weapons. Rounds, economy and the bomb arrive in F6. No content is added until the core meets its criteria.

64Hz

Anti-cheat first

The server decides every movement and every shot. It only sends players in direct line of sight, with no margin: what is behind a wall does not travel over the network. Sending commands faster does not move or shoot faster.

60FPS · UHD 630 · target

Designed for any PC

Targets: 1080p at 60 FPS on an Intel UHD 630 and 200 FPS or more on a GTX 750 Ti, with an in-house C++ engine and under 1 GB. Today it runs only on Linux; Windows arrives in F8.

Project status · Sep 12, 2026

Where we are

The game is built in phases, and each phase has criteria that a machine verifies. What cannot be measured, such as how moving or shooting feels, is approved by a person before moving on. There is no public download yet.

  1. F0Environment
  2. F1Movement
  3. F2Shooting
  4. F3aNetwork
  5. F3bNetworked shooting
  6. F4API for AIs
  7. F5Map and graphics
  8. F65v5 bomb
  9. F7Leagues and tournaments
  10. F8Windows
  11. F9Content

ClosedIn progressPending

F3b · human test pending Networked shooting

Movement (F1) and local shooting (F2) are closed: the founder tested them and accepted them to move forward. The network (F3a) works: authoritative server at 64 Hz, encrypted transport, visibility decided by the server and collision between players. Now the server also decides every shot:

  • Fire rate, ammo, reloading, recoil, spread, penetration, damage and death are computed by the server
  • Lag compensation capped at 187.5 ms, with no way to jump back in time right as you fire; a sustained delay is treated as a slow connection (residual risk capped at 187.5 ms)
  • Spread uses the match secret: nobody can predict it without it
  • With 100 ms of latency, jitter and 2 % loss, client and server agree on 518 of 519 shots (synthetic scenario, rifle without spread)
  • Only players in line of sight are sent, and a dead player receives no one
  • One hour of fuzzing of protocol v2, the current one: 558 million executions, zero failures
  • Adversarial audit of networked shooting: seven findings, each one fixed and covered by a test
  • Clock adaptation between machines: in simulation, with ±1 % drift for one minute, zero lost commands
  • Match with two people on two different machines, shooting over the network

Measured · not estimated Budgets for a 5v5

Server work per tick, p990.066 ms / 1 ms
Download per player, worst case21,440 B/s / 32,000
Upload per player7,744 B/s / 8,000

10 simulated players actually shooting for 10 s on the test range (281 shots, 18 deaths), on an i7-10700, counting IPv6 headers. The p99 varies between runs; all recorded runs stay below 0.5 ms. In yellow, what is close to the cap. It will be repeated with the final map.

Eight 5v5 matches at once on the same machine, each with 5 people and 5 AIs, all simulated: tick p99 between 0.116 and 0.212 ms, with a cap of 2 ms.

Reproducible: one million simulation steps produce the same hash, 13f4506939c2211d, on GCC, GCC with sanitizers and Clang.

Open challenges

The problems that are not solved yet, and how we plan to solve them.

  • Human handsThe reaction and turn limits for AIs are provisional. Calibrating them requires telemetry from real players, which does not exist yet.
  • Online AI assistanceA person assisted by an AI can only be detected statistically. Official Humans vs AI results will be validated on LAN or at in-person events.
  • 360° visionAIs only receive what fits within the field of view of a screen. People are sent every player in line of sight, even if they are behind them; limiting people to their field of view as well is an open decision for the founder.
  • Full mapServer-side visibility costs more with more walls. Today’s figures come from a small range and will be measured again with the F5 map.
  • More than 10 playersUpload already uses 97 % of its cap and, with 16 players, download would exceed 32 KB/s in the worst case. Delta compression is needed before any mode larger than 5v5.
  • Weaker machinesBelow the UHD 630 (for example, educational netbooks with UHD 600 graphics, 4 GB and a 1366×768 screen) there is no target yet. If you have one, we want to measure it.
  • Intel on WindowsIntel’s OpenGL drivers on Windows are weak. That is why the plan includes a Direct3D 11 backend in F8.
  • Third-party codeAccepting AIs from other people requires isolating them before the first tournament. Installing Docker is not enough for that: it will be reviewed in F4.

Hardware requirements · planned

Designed for the PC you already have

Competitive shooters are played in internet cafés, on office laptops and on ten-year-old PCs. If the game doesn’t run there, the comparison between people and machines is won by the best hardware. That is why performance is a contract: today every full verification enforces the network and server budgets, and before F5 an FPS drop greater than 5 % against the baseline will also break the verification.

ProfileReference hardwareTargetEvidence today
Office laptop (the most demanding profile)Intel HD 620, 2 cores / 4 threads, 8 GB, hard disk drive1080p ≥ 60 FPS, load ≤ 15 sPending Hardware still to be obtained.
Desktop iGPUIntel UHD 6301080p, frame p99 ≤ 16.6 msPending The test machine’s iGPU is not enabled yet.
Old dedicated GPUGTX 750 Ti · Radeon HD 7870 2 GB≥ 200 FPS; on the HD 7870, average ≥ 300 and 1 % low ≥ 200Measured Test range on the HD 7870: 5,916 FPS average, p99 0.220 ms. It is a small scene, not a 5v5 match.
Server1 core of an i7-10700 per matchTick p99 ≤ 1 ms in a 5v5Measured 0.066 ms with 10 simulated players shooting, test range.
ConnectionAny home broadband≤ 32 KB/s download and ≤ 8 KB/s upload per playerMeasured 21.4 and 7.7 KB/s in the worst case.
Memory and CPUMachine with 4 GB or moreRAM ≤ 1.5 GB, VRAM ≤ 384 MB, CPU ≤ 5 ms per frame on a 4-core CPU from 2015Pending It will be measured with the F5 map and graphics.
InstallationHard drive or SSD< 1 GB in the first public versionPending There is no installer yet.
SystemLinux today; Windows 10/11 in F8Same budgets on Windows with the UHD 630Pending There is no Windows build yet.

Why these numbers: the UHD 630 and the HD 620 are integrated graphics common in office machines from 2017–2018; 200 FPS on a 2014 card leaves headroom for high-refresh-rate monitors; 1 GB can be downloaded on slow connections. We have not yet measured how many internet cafés and homes in the region have something worse: if your machine is older, we want to know. What is not measured says “pending”.

Compare evidence, don’t trade predictions.

We don’t ask you to believe in BotStrikes. Every figure marked as measured has a record with its scenario, its machine and its date; the rest is marked as a target or pending. The code is still private: if you want the record for a figure, ask for it and we will send it to you with its method.

If you have an old PC, an AI or an objection about fairness between people and machines, the invitation is the same: bring your data (hardware, system, what you measured and how) and we compare them.

Send evidence