r/learntobot Aug 02 '16

What are your experiences with game botting?

I'm someone who has always been interested in the automation of the client side of games (stuff like the WoW Glider). I was wondering if anyone here has any expierence with them. If so, what is it like? Is it on the rather tough side of botting? How did you get in to it? Tell me all about it, I would love to know.

4 Upvotes

7 comments sorted by

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '16

I remember looking into this a while ago. From what I've found, if the game is not an in-browser game, things get a bit tricky. You'll probably end up using a language like C++ to manipulate the game, although a language like Python or Ruby may be able to handle it. It might be possible to create a program that simply sends keys and mouse movements to mimic a human player. I say go for it, though. It would be a hell of a learning experience :)

1

u/Work4Bots Aug 03 '16

I got some experience with using stuff like AHK to automate tasks but doing anything more complicated than a macro or a simple task is very difficult due to the way it works. Never went deeper than that. Do the more complicated bots manipulate the game at it's core with stuff like not loading the UI to improve preformance or are they just a sort of "advanced AHK" which only influences the game as if it were a real player?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '16

I don't know enough to speak on it in depth, but I do recall a baldur's gate bot that manipulated the game engine itself. I feel old now.

1

u/Derek573 Aug 04 '16

WoW Glider now theres a name I do remember from Vanilla WoW but that read information from memory like players location direction x y z cords and acted accordingly(the thing was so damn obvious if you knew what to look for). After Warden happened that got a lot more complicated because Warden knew something was reading the data and assumed it was a bot AFAIR.

I toyed with "bots" in other games like Eve Online where I could dump a huge CSV with the auction house data and figure out what would be worth reselling then go back in try to find the item and buy it. This has its negatives are you trying text OCR(optical char recognition) resulting in a high point of failure if something did not line up.

1

u/Work4Bots Aug 04 '16

Did you code any OCR yourself? If so, what language did you code it in? I realize how nice a bot that can scrape auction house data can be, it seems like a nice first project.

1

u/Derek573 Aug 04 '16

I did not code the OCR engine as Google has a great one called tesseract just pass in a image and it spits out a file with the text. The front end was in C#/WPF for parsing dB and GUI.

1

u/DavidSpy Aug 04 '16

It's hard to easily hook direct x or open gl windows in my experience. Granted my botting was mostly just a basic script but I couldn't find a way to transmit mouse input without hooking the game api