Comment by verroq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by verroq | Hacker News Reader

Botting was actually much more fun the playing the real game.

Back in the golden days, the bot frameworks rsbot/powerbot/rsbuddy gave you a Java API into the game. Your script gets called every game loop (by the API) and you can tell your character to walk to places, click on things, pathfind your way around the game world. The API could access your player's levels and experience and gave your script (a Java class) an onPaint event to draw a GUI.

Botters were spending their time learning Java, on the forums were people talking about more in depth programming concepts and ways to improve code quality. The bot frameworks were open source (with the exception of "modscripts" - a series of regexes and what not to remap the bot APIs back into functions in the obfuscated Jagex client).

Jagex has also implemented turing tests - "random events" where your character get teleported a special area and has to perform a challenge. The bot framework has scripts to handle this as well and was generally not a huge issue.

The best part was that it was all real, if your code misbehaves, people will report you and you will get banned. If your code works flawlessly, it will run for days and you'll get rave reviews from fellow botters on the forums.

If anything it was a great environment to develop CS skills. And of course after you botted up your stats and unlocked new abilities the game becomes even more fun.

Semi-related I suppose, I'm building a game where botting is the whole point: http://armoredbits.com/

I've always thought that something like this could be really cool; I'll be following with interest.

I will say that your website is fairly hard to read. The high contrast and squashed text (and maybe font?) are quite hard on the eyes, at least for me.

I hope it ends up being as cool as it sounds!

I'll try lower contrast colors and a different font. Thanks for the feedback!

I saw this yesterday but only now I realise it's (probably) about programming your mechs to fight.

I think you need some better presentation. I'm reading the main page again but I still don't have a good idea of how the whole thing is supposed to work. The FAQ is a bit more clear.

Anyway, if I got it right, it sounds interesting. I'll be keeping an eye out. Good luck.

Thanks for the feedback. I've been having trouble trying to convey exactly what it is in a clear an concise manner. I'll go through and give it another update.

This was how I got started - https://villavu.com/

SCAR Resource Library was the best, it was this huge framework for making SCAR scripts (which basically automated pointing and clicking). There was a lot of code in that framework, handling all the 'edge cases' of RuneScape like random events and other players interacting with you.

Yep, this was what got me into CS in the first place, that and glider for WoW.

I easily spent more time botting than pk'ing/questing/etc.

Tweaking an autominer script to better detect patches, fixing a pathing issue for a random event, even more rewarding than the levels/items(but they didn't hurt).

I've spent countless hours creating botting frameworks/bots as well as client features for the Haven & Hearth client (http://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/). The vanilla client is open source and pretty shitty, so the community is basically relying on hobbyist devs to create their own versions. The super-secret clients (that will eventually leak) all have their own botting frameworks. The game is permadeath, as well, so a lot is at stake.

This is something that I'm really quite sad that I missed out on. By the time I was interested in programming enough to understand how this would all work it was a couple of years too late.

I'd say Minecraft is the 'new' version of this kind of thing, though certainly in a different sense - it's actually pretty opposite in some ways (making the gameplay rather than beating it). I'd be interested to see what comes along next.

Absolutely agree with the sentiment but it should be illegal to call powerbot rs buddy etc the golden days :D the golden days were before the profiteering age...

This was a really fun read - any longform posts on the history of this? Would love to read more.

There was an interesting defcon talk featuring the developer of WoWGlider, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hABj_mrP-no

While not directly related, definitely worth a watch.

Some of the most engaging experiences, outside of normal game play, in WoW was writing robots that would evade human detection. I spent a lot of time observing and implementing human behavior to make sure it seemed like the character was a quiet player. Such as going AFK during meal times so an imaginary player could make a sandwich. Other simple improvements were allowing the pathing to deviate from set points instead of trying to follow a precise line.

I initially fell in love with programming by botting Runescape. If you want to look at some old (and very very poor quality) code to see what the botting scripts looked like, this was my most popular one: http://pastebin.com/WENWkWEW

There were some really interesting "innovations" in those scripts compared to the other free ones that were available at the time. For example, this script would allow the character to harvest and store wood from trees that would regrow / respawn. This script would time each hardcoded tree to count how long it had been de-spawned (dead) in order to move the bot user to wait by the tree that had been de-spawned the longest when all of the others were de-spawned. This was a good way to avoid being reported because most bots would just wait by the last tree to de-spawn and then instantly start moving to the first one that respawned.

Some other interesting tricks could be found in the "antiBan" method in a lot of scripts. Given a random input this script would move the mouse in some random ways, check some random stats, move the camera around, etc. One additional "antiBan" approach that I implemented for this script was to "take breaks". The idea was that a real player would probably not be watching their account and harvest the wood with perfect efficiency all of the time. Telling the bot to "take breaks" meant that it would turn itself off entirely for a short time (maybe a minute?) and just not react to any input, as if you were using the restroom or doing something else.

I could talk about this stuff for ages, it was great fun. :)

P.S. I have a tiny blurb about it on my website too: https://www.dwett.com/projects/#runescape-bot

I actually wrote the YewMurder script that was the first one to do tree timing (AFAIK), unforunately all the older posts all seem to have been purged from powerbot forums so we can't know for certain. Maybe just great minds think alike.

And somebody preserved my script on pastie for prosperity: http://pastie.org/pastes/1603353

Found a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it8QwmDj7Pw

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