Bot#

Status Update

Posted on by Savagedlight

It has been a very busy couple of months, especially with getting a new puppy last month.

I’m in the process of restructuring my personal infrastructure! In extremely broad terms, this will simplify and clarify each servers role, hopefully making it easier and more predictable to maintain the infrastructure. I’ll write a in-depth post on this at a later date!

I’ve also been working on a number of projects related to the game Anarchy Online. Probably most notable is the launch of Demoder’s PlanetMap Viewer v1.2, adding many new features which are described in the thread. Work have begun on sanitizing the Itemsbot and CIDB tool chain by making an independent resource database parser which handles all items, nanos, icons and a few other data types. I’ll go into detail on this later. Vha.Net and Vha.Chat is being upgraded from .NET 2.0 to .NET 4.0 (client profile), and is receiving a new packet system in the process. I’m currently on the planning stage for porting Helpbot to Bot#; No ETA yet.

Photography status: Slacking! I’ve taken some less-than-stellar photographs, and have not bothered uploading these; I am probably going for a photo spree this weekend though; Hopefully I’ll be able to take some which are upload-worthy. :)

My game time is pretty evenly split between Civilization 5 and The Secret World – an amazing modern-time MMO RPG. If you didn’t check it out yet, you should – Ragnar Tørnquist, the man behind The Longest Journey, is the main guy behind the game.  The story easily sucks you in like a good book which you just can’t put down till you’ve finished reading. Quests are very original and fun – I end up doing quests not for their XP or loot, but for the story and direct entertainment value.

Sunday with Demoder

Posted on by Savagedlight

This week has been a blast!

Diet & Exercise

Diet’s holding up great! Keeping it at about 150g carbs per day, and keeping sugar alcohols to a minimum. Weight is holding stable. I’ve picked up the habit of walking the dogs at least once per day again. They really enjoy that; And I get some exercise as well.

Weather

There’s lots of great weather here lately, sunny with some clouds, not much rain at all. I’ve been enjoying myself outdoors, bathing in the sun. It’s almost incredible how much good weather can help when you’re in a bad mood!

Photography

I’ve taken only one photo this week, and it was more like a snapshot.

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Coding core features

Posted on by Savagedlight

I’ve somehow slightly started on the scheduled coding spree, half a month early. I’m working on the core aspects of the code; The parts which makes a lot of non-connected events and data come together into a nice, clean interface for plugin developpers to interact with. The better job I do with the core aspect of the bot, the easier (and more enjoyable) it will be for people to extend its feature set.

I kind of figure that I shouldn’t really program any ‘directly usable features’ until all the core features are in place; Much because if I do implement a lot of features at this stage, any change to the core of the bot will involve lots of code change to the features which were prematurely implemented.

Todays most significant change is that plugins are now able to refer .Net and external libraries not referenced by default. To take a simplified example: The bot does not reference a MySQL library by default. This means no plugin is able to connect to MySQL databases without using unsafe code, which is not permitted for plugins.
With todays change, a plugin developer can attach the required MySQL libraries, then tell the plugin compiler to reference them when it does its thing. The plugin can then access MySQL databases.

Simplicity vs Features

Posted on by Savagedlight

It always starts with a simple idea. “I need a chatbot for Anarchy Online!”. The following days will involve a lot of thought, and hopefully, realization that it’s a project much bigger than first anticipated. This is what happened the first time I wrote a bot from scratch for AO (written in PHP, named ‘FLWBot’, using the BeBot-updated AOChat library developped by Auno). And I knew it would happen when I started on Bot#, too.

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Scheduling

Posted on by Savagedlight

I’ve had a coding drought the past couple of months. This is the best description I can think of: If you find a polar bear hunting for seals in the Sahara desert, he have probably been more productive/successful than my coding lately.

Therefore, I’ve decided to find a random date which is a while after I get my new laptop, where I will have a week dedicated to working on Bot#. I’m thinking 13th-19th June.

Things which have to be dealt with:
Rewrite of friends manager; Focus on internal tracking of friends/types, THEN on how to actually track them using the chat server.
Improve connection handler: Utilize multiple host IPs where applicable
Try to further improve the plugin system