I had a long convo with some people very knowledgable in such things, and apparently the only way to do it is to hardcode false X signals and send them through his script and into Vendetta.

Way too confusing for me. SL crawls into his hole in the ground.

lol SL,

Same here, to difficult for me :(

My conclution too - /me would really like a ingoing pipe for console commands...

/me fires up ethereal and starts investigating

Make sure you guys give the devs the source code (email it to them). They're going to need this later to prevent against bots. You might complain that this would get rid of BountyBot, but the insane amount of bots was one of the main things that made Ragnarok utterly, utterly suck (the game itself was great). The bots created tons of lag, and everyone complained about them. Also, devs, I suggest you have the updater run a checksum on each of the items (and preferably find a way to run a checksum on the updater itself) used by Vendetta. This should prevent against bots that modify the program itself. The biggest problem will probably be bots that work like BountyBot, simulating keystrokes with an external program...

Oh absolutely. Just as long as they would leave the "feature" in until it becomes unneeded due to game enhancements like missions and other rpg-like elements.

The updater already checksums every file, along with itself. That's how it works :). As for our network stuff, anyone who can figure out our incredibly complex, dynamic compression scheme and protocol deserves to be able to run bots. We used to encrypt the datastream, until we realized that our adaptive compression system was so bloody complicated that it made doing 64bit blowfish a rather redundant waste of additional overhead.

Anyway, we don't have any problem with bountybot, or other innocuous bots of that nature. This isn't to say we'll permit them in the Long Run (maybe we will.. hell, maybe we'll make an API, who knows), but we have no problem with them right now. Of course, if we had a gazillion irritating bots (sitting online, taking up resources) we might be moved to get rid of them.

Yeah, I have no problem with the harmless (and even beneficial) ones like BountyBot. The problem is, it's sort of a given that somebody WILL make a bot that has its own AI so it can trade or something... I didn't know about the checksumming, though. I thought it just checked the date modified... ^_^ Actually, how what percent of CPU utilization for a given processor does the encryption add? It may be worth it later, when people start trying to use it to make bots. Heck, they might find a way to use it to give themselves items or something. I remember reading something about a "sanity check" a while ago, though... Actually, you could maybe release a bot SDK kit or something to a few trusted people who've sent in a bot request with the statement, "by using this software, you agree to only make approved bots. If you do otherwise, your account will be terminated without a refund, you will be banned from Vendetta, and you may be fined." Just legal mumbo jumbo to prevent people from making malicious bots from stuff you give them... :P Actually, you might want to put that in the license agreement for Vendetta itself...

Yeah, I have no problem with the harmless (and even beneficial) ones like BountyBot. The problem is, it's sort of a given that somebody WILL make a bot that has its own AI so it can trade or something... I didn't know about the checksumming, though. I thought it just checked the date modified... ^_^ Actually, how what percent of CPU utilization for a given processor does the encryption add? It may be worth it later, when people start trying to use it to make bots. Heck, they might find a way to use it to give themselves items or something. I remember reading something about a "sanity check" a while ago, though... Actually, you could maybe release a bot SDK kit or something to a few trusted people who've sent in a bot request with the statement, "by using this software, you agree to only make approved bots. If you do otherwise, your account will be terminated without a refund, you will be banned from Vendetta, and you may be fined." Just legal mumbo jumbo to prevent people from making malicious bots from stuff you give them... :P Actually, you might want to put that in the license agreement for Vendetta itself...

BTW to all, BountyBot runs on Mac OS X, and does not use X11 at all.

But yes, it does work by sending fake keyboard events to the real Vendetta client, and reading the results from the errors.log.

It is able to send different keyboard events to different copies of the client running on the same machine, but doing so bogs down the 266MHz G3 too much. A stdio-only client would be much more efficient.

It would really boost performance and possiblities of such game-bots dramaticly. As long as the only ingoing messages would be chat and console commands, the programming of real moving bots would still be nearly impossible (as it should be).

BountyBot takes a cut of the money offered as a bounty. The amount of money that runs through the bot must be a tidy income for whoever runs it, which is a little unfair.

I'd rather see the devs run the bots than the players.

Ok, Bountybot took his time to make the bot, he deserves the income from it. I doubt devs will make bots because bots are a rather crud way for the devs to implement things, depending on what you are implementing. Besides, player made bots let devs set the priority of something to work on lower so they can work on other stuff.

BountyBot has been running for around 4 months. 24/7, except when network conditions caused a disconnection. In that time, BountyBot has collected 2.5M in fees, and paid out 18M in bounties.

Trading, you can make 2M credits in what, 2 hours?

It's not a tidy income. It's hardly even play money.