Remote view program simi release

The last release was bad (only a simple test prototype).
This one is much better, still no documents but at least it can now show/hid players, mobs and current game image upon select, continue showing them without need to click, and if you move your mouse over the the red and blue dots (red=>mob blue=>player) it will show their names.

I will temporarily stop development and have some fun, so next 2 weeks will be my vacation from bot development.

zoloFighter 0.7.9.38b, with flying & mine support

Original idea is from John.bastos. He want to fly and mine in outland. zoloFighter can mine but because mines usually are on edges of cliffs, mining is not easy with a bot. John's idea (flying around and land for mine) solves the problem.

The implementation is easy. First I added a file fightermodes.txt, you can add any new modes in there and it will show up in the mode dropdown box. I added fly&mine.

So select that, flying around and set waypoints (bot will try to fly back to waypoing when done), and click fight it will go flying and mine.

When a mine within 30 yard is detected, bot will turn to it, slowly fly to top of it (you will see it does that step by step), slowly lands on top of mine, mine/mount/fly back to waypoint.

Right now it is only a beta, need more user to test it.

I tried it in Nagrand, because that place is full of Fel Iron and Adamantite deposits. Debugging is not easy. It is a slow process. First you need to find a mine and second you need enough time before it is looted by others.
While I was testing on the first mine, another player beat me to it while my toon is landing slowly...

Essays by Paul Graham

http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

The above link are essays by Paul Graham. I am posting the link here hoping more people can be influenced by his thinking.

People everywhere in the world should be more creative and independent, especially young people who has nothing to loss. God knows how many new wonderful things can be created, and in the process of benefiting others, they them selfs might became rich too :-)

Ban!!

Recently there are 2 banned user reports on the forum. When they first appear I feel the pain.

One guy farmed primal life and crashed server economy (He did get his account back though grats to him), the other simply bot for 2 weeks and get his char from 10+ to 50+. I think that is moderate... When I was rushing to level 70, I got impatient at the end and starting to run it full night, and my speed was about 1 month for 2 chars from 60-70 (and with me questing too, because it feels very slow to just grind).

Anyway, more steps will be build in to prevent banning. I will add back whisper auto reply (replaced by javascript but no one is implementing their own...), and add remote control so we can monitor/reply while at work or school.

Guild drama

Well, recently our small Guild was rippled with tiny frictions between 2 of the more active members. Even though my wife still doesn't like WOW, she was draw to my email like fly over wet sugar.

For my own security I will not disclose the details, I just have to say the drama played out rivals that of Shakespeare quality. Quit amazing how tiny things can rapture relationships :-(

Supporting pains

As zoloFighter got more and more popular (now way surpass zoloFisher), the pain of supporting is also getting bigger and bigger. Every day there are people asking the repeating questions such as how do I start, why can't it be started (even tough I have made the forum avaliable.

And also sometimes bot won't start on someone's computer even though they followed all steps. But you never know what was the user doing, sometimes they do things that are surprising to you. I remember one instance when I helped one of my friend's friend on his internet connection (he kept complaining about how slow his cable modem was), and eventually found out he was using someone else's open wireless connection (and his 1MG+ bandwidth was totally wasted).

The locale problem is solved, I have posted on my forum. Basically MS set locale to "C" in C++/C programs, but use native locale in .Net apps. So I just set locale to en-us in .Net and now their outputs are compatible.

floating number format issues

It just come to my attention that in Europe and Russia, floating numbers are displayed differently. For example, 1.0 in US is 1,0 in Europe, and 10,000.00 is 10.000,00 is Europe. So basically my action delay of 1.5s (1 and a half seconds) could be parsed as 15 seconds!!

I am getting conflicting reports on this one. User reports says it is taking the '.', and a friend of my also told me Fortran and C++ libs uses '.'

Microsoft's website indicates other wise. It indicates to use locale independent atof,I need to use atof_l.

So I am really lost. And to write my own implementation means I need to find every place where printf, ostream, atof are used and replace them. Too much work.

And also my configuration utility, which is written in .Net, always print out in the format of the current locale.
This makes me sick!

Set ACL

While searching for a way to open WOW's directory to guest access and protect bot's directory from been poked by guests, I found SetACL, by Helge klein's

So I reused his program, and wrote my own to generate scripts to add guest access to WOW's directory, and remove guest access to bot's directory.

http://www.zolohouse.com/wow/wowFighter/tutorials/troubleshoot.html

German guest account name

Today another user on mmowned posted about can't use zolofighter to start WOW.
Since there are quit a few people complaining about it, I decided to try it myself. Doing it over lunch, what I did is add a guest user named Gast, and set GUEST:guest in settings.txt to GUEST:gast.
Surely enough I got the "Can't start WOW" message.

What happened is, a few month ago I switch the entire program to UNICODE based, so Asian players can see the correct outputs. But since settings.txt is still ascii, I used a windows api to convert it to Unicode. The problem is I specified the type to be UTF8 instead of ascii. So while it converts all ordinary ascii chars correctly, Gast is not one of them. It got converted into "gst".

So, another release.

busy days

I was so busy recently that I had to do something I recommended my users not to do: bot AFK. Start from morning till I got home at noon, so 4 hours each day is not that bad, generate some extra cash :-).

I have been doing this for 2 weeks now, with some days I don't even have time to start the bot. Well that is not exactly bad, because it generate some randomness on my bot patterns.