Project BabBot

[tanis2000]

Project BabBot
==============

.Introduction
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It looks like with the latest patch, a lot of bots have been taken offline due to legal problems with their authors. If you've been following the cases, all of them were related to money being made out of such programs. This made me think about giving a kick to this whole affair of closed source bots and get something going within the community to have a working bot that is made by those who use it. Some months ago, me and a friend, decided to write our own bot in C#, mainly as a test of what could be done and in part because of the lack of features of other bots available for free. The idea, now, would be to let other developers jump on the boat and give them full access to the source code and start releasing it to the community in a completely free form.

.Management
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Management of the project will be on a controlled open source (pass me the term), meaning that sources will be held on a private repository and access to them will be given to developers willing to join the project. The only reason to this is to prevent the source code to leak easily to Blizzard or any of their affiliates. This should reduce the chances of having them on our tail from day one.
All of the releases will be free, with no payments, donations or anything going on. We do not want to offer Blizzard any hook to shut us down.
Me and the co-author of the bot will maintain the role of guiding the project throughout its evolution and we will of course keep working on the code along with the other developers involved. But, as stated before, this will be a community project and thus it will be the community itself to suggest us where to go.

.Current Status
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At the time I'm writing this, the bot is working with version 3.0.9 of the client and I have to test it with 3.1.0
There is a basic framework that lets the bot interact with the client without any code injection, there's support for external C# scripts that can be loaded at runtime to provide all the logic of the bot that can thus be further enhanced by anyone in the community who can code a few lines of C#.
Basic movement, anti-stuck and combat functions are already in.
Some parts still need to be completed, like the waypoint navigation system, key bindings, a better timing function.. there's a lot to do and a lot to enhance to have a complete bot, but I'm pretty sure that if there's enough interest and enough people willing to contribute we could pull this off in a very short time.

.So what are you looking for?
-----------------------------

I'm looking for replies to this post to evaluate if this project can be shared by some or most of the community or if it's just like shooting into a pool of water. If there's enough interest, I'll get this rolling. At the same time, I'm more than willing to listen to different proposal, if any. The goal is still the same: having a free working bot to which different people can contribute to further enhance it.
On a side note, it would have been better if Panda opened his zolobot to the community as it would have been a far better starting point. But his decision is his only. So.. here we are.

[sp0rkeh]

I was thinking of doing something similar but was not looking forward to actually managing something like this myself. That being said, I'm definitely in. You should set up a forum somewhere to get some discussions going. Also, you should outline some basic roles that you're looking to fill(e.g. "We need X people for developing individual class combat modules" etc.) I'm personally most experienced in the network and information security aspect of programming, so I think I would be most useful in implementing anti-detection techniques, although I don't mind working on other parts of the project as well.

[tanis2000]

Actually I think this place would be the best due to the nature of the people contributing to this forum. We have a lot of developers in the bots section and maybe some of them could be interested in such a project as well.

Right now the key roles needed are:

- Someone working on the combat system. There is a basic one but it can be largely improved

- Someone who can actually make an anti-detection system as right now we're safe only because there's no code injection going on and the process is running under a different account, but that's all of it at the moment.

- Someone working on the bindings system. This is a huge hole as this has not yet been implemented. There are some ideas on how to do it but no code has been written yet.

- Someone working on a centralized system to update the bot and/or block all of the bots online for safety purposes (aka if we figure out that a certain version of the bot might get your account banned we want to be able to block all of the bots around to prevent the final user from being banned)

- Someone who can code the navigation system. We have a lot of ideas and solutions for this which is one of the key points of any bot and we need a hand with getting it going

- Someone who can enhance the scripting support. The current one is quite good to be honest, but there's room for improvements.


- Lots of testers

[baintzimisce]

I would be happy to help. This is something that sounds very promising. I am just starting to get into bot programming though, and have been doing research, but still am a little clueless in certain areas. I'd be happy to test for you, or help where ever I can.

[tanis2000]

Well.. that accounts to two new members on the roster
I wonder if there's anyone else interested or if it's just the few of us :-P

[antonp93]

I'm not that much into developing, but I could test the bot for you, since I (sadly) play alot.
Seems like a promising project tho! Hope more people joins!

[sp0rkeh]

Also worth noting: If you were to release the bot source openly, you'd be allowed to (legitimately) implement PPather, which to me is the biggest difference between Glider and the currently operating bots.

[tanis2000]

Also worth noting: If you were to release the bot source openly, you'd be allowed to (legitimately) implement PPather, which to me is the biggest difference between Glider and the currently operating bots.

How would that be possible? I think I overlooked something :-P

[sp0rkeh]

How would that be possible? I think I overlooked something :-P

The PPather source (at least the trunk builds) is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Edit: Actually, after reading the license over carefully I've realized I was wrong about having to open source the entire bot. Under the LGPL you're allowed to modify the library(PPather) and distribute it with your proprietary application so long as you also release the source of your modified version of the library under the LGPL.

[Tierman]

This would be amazing. I forsee many ads on your page, I'll click em. Hopefully you can someway make some cash off this, dont want your efforts to be invain. Either way, this is a good Idea and I really want to see this develop.

[slack7219]

im a private server C++ dev,i mostly take care of stability,performance...mem leaks and such but my RL jobs are in C# so count me in if you could use an extra hand.

[Zephir]

Hello,

sounds like a good idea. I'd like to help you if my schedule allows it.
I have developed bots and hacks for 2 big MMORPG Communities. Pathing and Combat is not new to me. I do lack the skills of securing the bot so that warden cannot pick it up...

[nbk_cord]

I would help testing for sure

[poche]

i'd be glad to help to test this out :P but dont count on me for programming since i have no skill :P

[tanis2000]

The project is set up at SourceForge. As it is Open Source, everyone has anonymous access to the SVN to grab the source code.

If you're interested in testing, just register on the forums at the project's page and let me know that you're interested in getting in the "test" team so that we can come up with a list of people to send compiled binaries to when we need to test some features.

If you are interested in helping with the development, please register at Sourceforge and let me know either there or through a PM here your username and specialization (in case we haven't talked already) and I'll make sure to add you to the developers list on SourceForge.

Here's the project URL: SourceForge.net: BabBot