Instance soloing

Recently I have been doing some instance soloing with my Death Knight. The death knight has all blue gear crafted by my black smith (don't have time to get other gears).

So far, I have done SM, DM, BRD, UBRS, Stratholme, Scholomance.

Starts with SM, very easy, much easier than when I solo it with my l60 warrior. After that I got bold and went to BRD, Stratholme, Scholomance. Easy.

Dire Maul is very easy compare to when I tried it with my level 70 toon.

UBRS was a surprise. I saw a level?? fire boss, he was easy. However I died at the final boss once. Adding to the pain is I only have a short time every time I play, most of the time I have to leave my toon in the dungeon and abort. So after several days I tried again, this time I summoned a lot of ghouls and beat him with ease.

In UBRS, I wondered into another instance. That was a huge surprise. Mobs keep spawning and they overwhelmed me. I will try it again sometime later (and after some googling too).

new great wow 3.1 features

I was reading wowinsider today and noticed the little title a couple of lines down, Wow Casually

Since I am a ultra casual player, that caught my eye and I was not disappointed!! Yep. Here is a summary:
1. 30 minutes hearth (combine with the recall scroll means you can hearth 3 times an hour).
2. ground mount can swim. Huge time saver. Now I will no longer afraid of swim.
3. queue BG anywhere and return to the same place when BG ends!! Finally. It is a pain to go to a capital city to play BG. Now only if they could do that for instances :-)

Anyway, I have guest coming from out of state this week, so I will only update stuff that I wanted.

Javascript engine bug again!

I was very close to release of the initial beta battle ground AFK scripts, when all of a sudden I hit a strange problem when start run with release version of the code.

When the execution enters a javascript function that accepts 1 argument, the bot skips everything and starts the next round.

A close inspection found that happens when the bot is trying to access that argument. Isolate to that one function, and the script reports it does not known that argument! Samething running with debug mode is just fine.

The first thought I had is it is those #define statements again. But none of that is the case. While I was stepping through the code, parse of arguments mysteriously changed on a totally unrelated statement (on a compare statement)! Inspecting on the resulting assembly code, and I found the stock return was corrupting the arguments passed in. Turned out the Microsoft optimizer is optimizing on nuts!

After put all javascript engine code on /Od (disable optimization), problem solved.

So that concludes another wasted night.

Deadly deadmines

First, interesting post on CNN about forgotten presidents of US.

Second, using a very high level char to help your bodies in very low level dungeons is not a smart idea. I was in dead mines with a full group of level 10s, and guess what happened?

Well, deadlines is one dark place. I could walk by the mobs without noticing them, and they of course, ignores me. However my buddies attracts them like dead meat on flies. No matter how careful I try to be, my buddies often got killed by mobs, often a wipe. It was still worth it because we did have a good laugh together see how long the train of mob was when they were running around.

WOW 2.2.0 patch status

Well, this patch didn't change too much and Fisher is already online.

However fighter has some problems. Beside some of the recently added features, I have forgotten most of the method I used to re-discover offsets. Yesterday I released fighter, but after the release found it has some strange problems with running way points. It keep running back and forth. I have to go to bed because I got a full load of work (at my day job) today. This morning I get up early and finally found that I left some debug code uncommented and that is creating a huge performance penalty, which delays the way point detection and cause the toon to over shoot :-)

Well, I will do some more check tonight and hopefully release it soon.

Why create a bot?

Finally, I have created this blog. I wanted to do this for a long time now but keep delaying because of lazyness.

Anyway, like many people, I am a computer Gamer, currently playing World of Warcraft (WOW).

About a year ago, I started playing WOW because of my friends. We are a close group of friends playing C&C, Diablo since college. We just want to get the good memory back, and yes we had a lot of fun playing WOW together. Initially I started about 2 weeks late then my other friends, and that translated to about 10 level of difference (when we started). Oh God that 10 level is a huge difference. We tried to play WOW like Diablo II, but I just can't survive, you can't hurt mobs 5 level above you, that pretty much prevented me from playing with my friends! Yes there is a rest bouns, but since we are so new, none of us have much use of that. Also most of us are married and have a day job, so it is impossible to play the same style when we were in college (Yes, huge difference). Beside that, Wifes, Girlfriends all have huge impace too, so for us working class, there is no way we can spend more than 3 to 4 horus a day playing.

The initial excitment around WOW also caused major argo upon my wife. With the 3 to 4 hour of my life each day spend to WOW, I don't have much time with her any more. Well, I tried to get her to play WOW, but she doesn't like the 3D interface. The argo was so bad the tension is killing me (imaging half way in a dungen I have to hold all my teammates and go argo management on her).

WoW also has other interesting spots, like professions. Very usefull but very time consuming! One day while I was fishing, I got so bored and I thought, this should not be done by me, this should be done by a program! As a engineer major I was interested in computer programming since highschool, so a fishing bot is piece of cake. Basically image recogination (finally stuff learned in school became usefull). At the time I was not aware of any EULA etc, but since I am the only user this is no big deal. The result? fishing 300 without much argoing from wife And ZoloFisher is born (At the time I call it WowFisher), if you are interested check out at http://www.zolohouse.com/wow/wowFisher

So why stop there? why not making a Fighter bot? I am no stranger at hacking, back in college years, I hacked school's network (appletalk share), various games. I still remember we laughed so hard one day when I helped my friend with a hacked c&c beat a much skillfull player, and of course diablo fix file offsets etc. I was a warrior with a ton of mana and a mana shell top of my head. One PKer with a huge axe tried to kill me, and got a huge surprise instead

OK, long story short. hacking started. @#@$%^$E%! WTF?? This is not the old C style game any more, this is post Y2K DX9 MMORPG!! The hardware mapped memories, uses of std library, threads OMG. Well, I am no average programmer either, I have a wide range of interest, from how CPU works (back in high school, read that whole book), embedded systems, linux kernels , C/C++ to Java, C#, php, I know a lot of crap. This is certainly different than when I was digging RFCs, but presistance paid off (You will know what real presistance is if you are debuging on a 3 year old single core machine with a 5 year old graphics card, dumping 300mg of memory and analyzing on it).

With the initial link open, the rest is to implement a program to take advantage on it. All it remains is to read my position, and find the nearest mob, and keep pressing the same set of keys over and over till the mob is dead. I was so happy! I still remember the first day when I was testing out the turning, that was learned either from high school or mid school (tan, atan etc), at last have some real usefullness. why we need schools? The stuff I learned from school, beside reading and basic math, most are useless (Well, history is very important, if the teacher is good, you will learn the mistakes of your predcessors, if the teacher is bad, you learn the event and forget afterwards).

Well, that is pretty much how zoloFisher and zoloFighter are born. Wife still argos, but not as badly, most of the time I just need to setup the toon and check back once a while, and I am very proud of my work, so I decide to share it out. That was a hard process. If the product is just for you, you don't need to make it user friendly at all. Now it must be user friendly (that is good to me too, the initial row product is very very hard to use, even the waypoint has to be set 1 by 1). Also I found the EULA, and because the bot will be open for inspecting, proper hidden method must be used. To make the product flexiable, javascript engine from Mozilla is embedded so other engineer types can use it to customize the fisher/fighter to their own needs. Initially it is used to let people add their own whisper engine.

Well, I will stop here today, back to work now.
Panda