I've been working on the VOKB for almost 8 month now and I guess it's about time for a first public alpha release. I've rewritten most of the old python/lua client in LUA only and I just want to push this out because I may be without internet for a month or so.

Here's the addon, just extract it to your addons/ folder and type /vokb ingame (choose ONE of the following two archives):
http://dl.vokb.org/vokb-r428.tar.gz
http://dl.vokb.org/vokb-r428.zip

OR - Instead of downloading the archives I recommend checking out the current stable from my subversion repository:
svn co http://vokb.svn.sf.net/svnroot/vokb/vokb/client/tags/stable vokb

or if you like broken stuffs:
svn co http://vokb.svn.sf.net/svnroot/vokb/vokb/client/trunk vokb

Currently it is:
- A FICS (Free Internet Chess Server) Client
- A public trade database accessible from ingame (reporting and looking up stuff)
- A Telnet-like tool (pretty useful if you need to send an email really quick :-))
- A Player database and an active-player list

Note that the download is quite large for a VO addon (600kb for the zip archive), but besides 3000 lines of code most if it are images stolen from xboard (a linux chess client).

Please also note that this is only a preview version, so besides being terribly broken (nah, it shouldn't be :-)), the following things are planned or have not yet been rewritten entirely in LUA:
- An IRC Client
- A storm tracker/notifier
- Kills/Deaths statistics thing

The counterpart to all this is http://vokb.org

Since this is quite a large project and I've always gotten a lot of help from the players here, I'd like to thank the following people, in alphabetical order:

- a1k0n (for tcpsock.lua and LUA help)
- Demonen/Zathras (for LUA help, LUA snippets and other stuff)
- Finster (for testing and LUA snippets)
- FiReMaGe (for LUA help)
- Konata/Scuba Steve (for LUA snippets and for letting me borrow his ideas)
- Katrina Le-Feir (for testing)
- Miharu (for extensive testing and great feedback)
- mr_spuck/chefkoch (for LUA help)
- Omega 0 (for testing)
- tumblemonster (for testing CLMDB stuff)
- yoda (for hosting CLMDB stuff)

Nice! Downloading now.

go go!

A chess client...! That's pretty damn impressive!

Next, we need to be able to challenge other VOKB users ingame to a game of chess!

David Lightman: Yeah. Weird isn't it? Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War.
Joshua: Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?
David Lightman: Later. Right now lets play Global Thermonuclear War.
Joshua: Fine.

Firsm sucks!

Neat, I might use it now since it doesn't have that external program action going on. I'll be tearing it apart to see how it works later today of course.

uhhm, I think that tarball is corrupt; I tried to download it twice :C

(zip works fine)

congrats Firsm this is a really nice addon but the player enter leave thing isn't working properly with me but otherwise its awesome

ADD AN IRC CLIENT TO IT zooot

Not that hard spidey... use telnet.

-Nautargos

You know, bomeone should visit every station in the universe with the vokb script running so the commerce archive is up-to-date. As it stands, the goods at some stations have never been recorded at all.

Heyyo, I checked-out the stable branch today and got some errors:

plugins/vokb/events.lua:161: attempt to call a table value
stack traceback:
plugins/vokb/events.lua:161: in main chunk
(tail call): ?
plugins/vokb/main.lua:51: in function 'dofile2'
plugins/vokb/main.lua:64: in function 'f'
vo/vo.lua:299: in function 'sb'
vo/vo.lua:341: in function 'OnInterfaceReset'
vo/vo.lua:367: in function <vo/vo.lua:365>

Looking forward to using VOKB very much!

... the plugin is outdated since firsm stopped working on it and took down the DB

Yeah. The errors you're getting are due to the fact that VOKB was written back when the game used Lua 5.0, which had significantly different syntax from that used in Lua 5.1, the current version. Since the code is, in the game's eyes, wrong, it won't even execute.

But even if you update it to be 5.1-compatible (which I did at one point), it won't matter since firsm took down the DB it relies on.