Creating Bots (Best Practices / Language?)

[intangibles]

Hi All,

I'm thinking about poking around in the world of botting but wanted to get some quick input. I've read a few guides and some bot creators discuss using memory, others use image capturing to point and click? Also various programming languages have been thrown around.

My question is this... What is the "preferred" method? If there is one. I have mediocre Java skills and also Ruby.

I was leaning towards image capturing as I found a guide and I'm not doing anything super complex. But I'll still have to put in a bit of effort learning. If i have to put in some effort, perhaps that would be better aimed at learning the memory side?

Thanks!

[Moike]

Hey, I'm kinda in the same boat as you. I've been trying to learn how to make some, but not really sure what direction to start with.

[intangibles]

Well... from my reading so far.

Memory is the best way to go. It gives a lot more control and there are some pretty good guides out there. However it seems like memory cheats can be detected.
Screenshotting / pixel color detection seems to be undetectable but requires some consistency in coloring. Also, unsure on performance. (Depending on language, could be an issue.)

for my initial WOW bot I might just go with something thats always predictable like window cursor placement. but there is a cool pixel detection guides using Javas Robot. Also a few using AutoIT.

[EmiloZ]

Without having any experience whatsoever creating bots for games etc, I would guess that

Memory injection would be the most stable way of controlling the wanted application.
However memory injection is detectable pretty easily.
You can get around the client side of the game, however the server is most diffently checking for changes as well.

Which leads to image capturing and some sort of mouse/keyboard emulator.
This would probably be your way to go, however just be aware that it isn't that difficult to detect bots anymore.


You should in some kind of way make sure your bot
1) Takes a different route every time. (Change the coords of your waypoints every time). Otherwise it would be waaaaay to obivious for a server-side software to detect multiple users crossing the exact same waypoints.
2) Acts with a realistic behavior is important. As said above, the server would detect users doing the exact same things.

[ASDF4Ever]

Is it possible to simulate clicks on a windown without actually moving the cursor, and with the windown being minimiced? In windowns or if not possible, linux.
I want to read the memory, and simulate clicks for the bot. Code injection would probably be the way to go for my target, as I happen to have an old deobfuscated decompilation version of the client, of some time that the developers didnt obfuscate a beta version of the client, but I dont think im good enough with RE for code injection just yet. (This is my first project related to anything like this, heh)
However... I dont have any idea about how to do the memory scanning either... Any ideas where to start learning? Ill probably start by changing the textures of the game to simple color, and using the game information chat channel to get quite some info about whats going on on the game, to make something very basic that I think I know how to do (I dont know how to click on a windown with it being minimiced/hidden in some way tho)

Edit: Does anybody know some open source bot I can look into?