Programing Help : VGExtreme General Discussion

I have been using this site for about 2 years now. I started with EQ2. I have a programming background but in a “Proprietary” programming environment. The language is a derivative of “C” but the syntax is very different than what I am seeing in VGextreme botting programs. My question is if I want to get myself a book for dummies so I can teach myself how to write the bots what language would I need to study? I have made very basic edits to things I have downloaded but would like to get to a point of writing my own. The Vanguard bot forum seems to be almost dead or fading and much of what I have downloaded needs tweaks to work for me. I have no intention of switching to a new game anytime soon AoC let me down so I want to devote all my efforts to VGSoH.

Thanks ahead of time for any advice.

The languages supported within the Exhume debugger are Visual Basic Script (vbs) and Java Script (js).

I have never seen anyone write a bot in js, so look for vbs information.

Most tutorials you find will be for compiled visual basic (vba), but that is a good place to start for learning syntax. Just keep in mind vbs is more limited and won't support all the features of vba (goto statements, user-defined class inheritance hierarchys, etc.)

Syntax of vbs is very simple and you should be able to figure it out just by studying some scripts on this site. here are a couple links that may help:

http://www.w3schools.com/VBscript/default.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y4wf33f0(VS.80).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ksh7h19t(VS.80).aspx


The VG boards actually are not dead, but there haven't been too many bots written. What is it that has needed tweaks? Slam666's UltraBot doesn't work "out of the box". He ported it to VG but it is buggy since it is basically the eq2 ultrabot with vg commands substituted and not designed for the quirks of vanguard.

Then there is my craft bot and mythicskunk's diplo bot, both should be fully functioning. A few other random simple bots are also present.

wyvernx will be reimplementing the vgewrapper, hopefully soon, so if you're more comfortable in C, you will be able to write your own stuff in visual studio.

Post if you have any more specific questions.

Well to be honest I have not tried the crafting bot or the diplo bot as of yet. Although I plan to in the VERY near future. Most all of the Hunter style bots don’t work out of the box without some tweaking. This is not a complaint. For example: and this is not to pick on this bot it does work just buggy.

The warrior bot is a good starting point for making a hunter bot. I find that the bot sometimes will miss judge the distance to the mobs. Only running half way to mob then unless you add your ranged bow attack it to your CA bar it just stands there saying target too far. Some times it fails to fully kill a mob resulting in it pulling multiple mobs and ending in death. I have spots laid out from lvl 10-50 that all have agro free mobs but still ends up with a train of mobs sometimes. It also has issues Targeting mobs with full health sometimes saying target already engaged. Life too low. The last thing I can think of that is not a problem but a design feature of the bot is to not target mobs of less than 100%. I would like to make this something I could change with a true statement. As in attack anything all the time. I find that sometimes my healer bot pulls heal agro then you end up with a train on the healer because tank will not target the mob engaged on the healer.

I feel I could work most of these issues out if I better understood the programming language. This drives me to post this. It isn’t that I think I can do better. I would just like to be able to fix issues without posting silly questions all the time or at least ask questions that warrant an answer.

I come from a little bit different background of programming, which is game development programming. I guess coding is coding, but I never really liked that database stuff. I prefer to keep my variables moving=). Anyways, I was curious about the scripting as well.

I'm *guessing* that vgextreme is just using Active Script thrown in there and has a ton of different functions inside the vgextreme code itself that the script accesses to get the values we may need to make our own scripts? The problem I see with that, and believe me, I couldn't do what WyvernX has done, so please take take the word "problem" and throw it out. The problem is that the script is still being bound by the constraints of which functions exist in the VGExtreme program itself. There are a few AI techniques I wouldn't mind trying to implement for diplomacy so you don't have to place certain cards in a certain order and all that, but I imagine its not too feasible to do with what we have. What are the chances you could throw that sort of AI logic in a .DLL and have that loaded via javascript? I'm guessing there's some of that .NET magic going on, so it wouldn't matter what language the DLL was written in.

1. VGextreme loads scripting language
2. Scripting language loads DLL
3. Script gets all values needed from VGExtreme and throws them into the logic .dll
4. Logic figures out what needs to be done, give info to script
5. Script sends info back to VGExtreme
6. VGExtreme makes the calls to the game, and you win lots of parley with very little scripted code.

Sorry if this made absolutely no sense. I never have been good at explaining myself=)

the VGE has alot of the diplomacy functions in there.

There is already a diplomacy bot script that you can modify/use to make your own.