Bots as means to infiltrate Bitcoin into bottable apps (e.g. IRC, MUD, games...)

[markm]

Any botters around, maybe with source code of bots for various popular venues?

I have not really looked yet at how to bot web-based things such as via greasemonkey browser-plugins or whatever.

First I built eggdrop-based IRC bots, now I am working on a bot for the Crossciv "Freeciv Galactic Milieu" Crossfire-RPG server. (It is online in game as the character known as "Trader".)

It occurs to me that it ought not be hard to use shell scripts similar to those my eggdrop-based IRC bots call from tools such as MUD-clients so as to be able to bring Bitcoin capabilities into pretty much any MUD / MOO etc type of environment / app / game, and that might interest me to do if player population actually picked up at kingdoms.se MUD which is the only one I ever really stuck with.

Can anyone recommend good scriptable-bot free source code available for scripting web based games?

-MarkM-

--
See sample web based game at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/

[TiagoTiago]

(adding thread to my watchlist)

[MoonShadow]

I don't understand the goal.  What advantages would Bitcoin bring to a MUD?

[markm]

I don't understand the goal.  What advantages would Bitcoin bring to a MUD?

Person to person pseudo-anonymous virtual commodity trading between games, maybe?

Sick of game X but got lots of goodies there? Interested in trying game Y with goodies? How about a bot playing game X buys your game X goodies and because the currency used is so virtual it can be transmitted to game Y, where a bot playing game Y will sell you game Y goodies for it?

Sick of games where you pile up vast piles of stuff only to find you cannot actually use it? I am in one currently that is very pretty and has merchants priests and heroes as well as armies to march on other cities with but it turns out all the wood stone gold etc I accumulate cannot even be spent! I maxxed out my "guild', cannot spend more on that. About all I could do would be slaughter all my troops regularly as cannon fodder to get my heroes experience and my city fame by attacking lairs of monsters. Actually the game seems totally useless for my purposes as I cannot even ship goods to friend's cities to help friends get established. So no point making a bot for that game, it is fundamentally broken for economy purposes. But not all games are quite THAT bad. Many do allow you to ship stuff around, give it or sell it to friend or foe or even just drop it someplace where animals and corrosion won't destroy it before someone arrives to collect it.

Sick of all the hassles involved in trying to deal in World of Warcraft gold, Runescape gold, etc? Lets set up games where there are currencies designed to be much easier for person to person trades to take place player to player regardless of what games they want to go to.

When I was a kid staying at my grandparents house with no other kids around I used to play all six monopoly characters, having each follow it's own personality to try to raise 1500 to buy a ticket to Careers, where they'd try to earn enough to buy into Mine a Million and invest in Totopoly horses. Have you never found it frustrating that so many games are by design incapable of working like unix commands where you can plug them in to each other in various ways to build larger pictures in which all the various games are merely parts of larger wholes?

That is the kind of thing I like to do. Galaxies of Freeciv planets, Crossfire RPG maps of the cities so you can run around in the streets or go kill rats in the sewers, each stock market city having an actual stockmarket game with all those stockmarkets interacting, each nation trying to float it's own currency and convince other nations it is worth something, on and on and on. Worldbuilding on a J.R.R. Tolkien meets E.E. Doc Smith scale!

-MarkM- (Skyluke Du Q here we come, use the farce! No no not the dork side, duh! )

P.S. Ideally the MUD would act as the captions / narrated video interface for those who cannot see and/or cannot use the fullblown holodeck rendering or even 2D or 3D graphical renderings of what is going on in their chosen aspect of the overall collection of multiverses...

[JamezQ]

Browser based games can be built differently, so I don't know if there could be a single library for all of them.

And there is the issue of capcha's, but if your looking for a bot that can play a browser based game, then maybe have it all connect to one main server, and have a bunch of bots connect to that, you can always have one built in python.

I have a quite a bit of experience scripting "web" things with python, my most popular python project is an API that takes normal would-be ajax json requests and puts it all in nice package that makes interaction easy, a few people have build projects based on it.


Anyway, for something simple, it can be done quickly and without experience with mechanize. For something more advanced, it might not cut it, and you will have to learn urllib and the like.


Anyway, I would imagine a bot would be built game by game, then connect to a single server, and then some standard commands would be created like "sell x" or whatever, and the bot would translate it to the appropriate game. Then interaction with the server could be make into a script and boom, you can use it and pipe it just like unix commands.

It's a pretty big project though.


tl;dr no I don't know of any, it might have to be made.

[TiagoTiago]

Are talking about setting up bot traders to convert wealth from one game/ 'verse into bitcoins, and then another bot elsewhere to convert bitcoins into local wealth?

For a service like that to work, i think it would be necessary to have a significant number of people in both endpoints that are willing to buy and sell in-world goods in exchange for bitcoins; otherwise there would be no where for the 'coins to come from to replace the goods you wanna sell at first, and if the first step is overcomed, you still gotta find someone in the second world that wants to give away their goods in exchange for 'coins. So i guess untill Bitcoin reaches such a criticl mass, an automated intermediary wouldn't be very usefull, would just sit there waiting for the human operators to do the legwork and in the rare times you do find someone that acepts your terms, using a bot to perform the trade would mostly be just an extra hassle, it wouldn't do anything that the regular bitcoin and virtual world clients can't already do by themselves.

[Reto]

I'm pretty sure this is against the rules of every (major) MMO out there.

[Anonymous]

Its probably the same issue that prevents you buying bitcoins with facebook credits...

[purplezky]

From the Facebook Credits Terms and Conditions:
"You may not accept Credits as payment for a currency or other stored value item that can be used outside of the application."

Bitcoins are considered a stored value item.

[em3rgentOrdr]

adding thread to my watch list.

awesome idea!  plus these bots could be used to spread anti central banking propaganda and talk about rothbard and stuff...

I'm pretty sure this is against the rules of every (major) MMO out there.

who said anything about following any rules?  dont make these bots associatable with your real legal identity.  try to not get your bot banned, but it happens, no sweat.  move on to another game.

i wish i could buy some advanced mining bot on minethings.com with bitcoin...

[BitVapes]

I've written many bots for web based games.  Not mud type but instead online casino games.  The principles are the same though, look at coordinates x,y for a pixel of color G, or a rectagle of 0,0,100,100 to have a checksum of $C then click left mouse at x,y, etc

it would store hashed values to a csv that identified the various 52 cards or button/game states etc and follow a pre-programed algorithm at playing the games.

I used AutoIT (www.autoitscript.com).  Unfortunately it is windows only

[markm]

It is true that games already out there probably won't allow it.

So it will probably be games intended for the purpose, in which case we should build APIs into them instead of wasting bandwidth sending out full GUI user-interfaces for the bots to try to decypher.

I was just being lazy, http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ doesn't have an API so I wondered how easy it would be to use some kind of already existing web-game-botting tool to bot it in the meantime. The more bots actually using it the incentive there would be to come up with an API for them so as to save bandwidth.

I already have bots for the Crossfire RPG, not as sophisticated as the famous NPC dragon bot someone runs that goes around looting and so on but just simply ones based on the small amount of bot code that someone actually published.

-MarkM-

[markm]

Testing using CoffeeMUD has revealed a whole further take on this; no longer is it just lets throw a few bots into some games, it is now closer to hmm how much do we even need humans in the games at all.

Basically it is kind of an offshoot of the idea of CPU mining.

(The two DevTome links above link to more info about this idea and where playtesting of it has brought us to so far.)

-MarkM-

[bitfreak!]

The best and easiest way to build legal game bots is to use a color based script which analyses pixels and mimics real mouse and keyboard actions. It's also the safest way to bot games without being detected (they will typically ban you even though it's supposedly legal). Take a look at SCAR or Simba (both are based on the Pascal Script engine) and browse the Villavu forum to see example scripts (typically for Runescape).

And for those who might be interested, I created my own scripting IDE for creating Mt. Gox trading bots, based on the same Pascal Script engine. Take a look: Deja Vu - Bot Scripting IDE.

[markm]

I find it easier to not forbid bots in the first place. Presto, using your MUD client's built in scripting is legal, go for it!

Or, write even better scriptable clients.

I think it is stupid to have to rely on image recognition, for one thing that implies the game is likely to be hard for blind people to play, so it isn't even an accessible game in the first place even for humans. People should be able to play using braille.

I expect actual competition in the game will likely end up showing its not the engine so much as the scripts that are key, but maybe not, maybe some things you just cannot do with normal MUD clients will turn out to give a major edge to clans that use some other engine to run their characters.

-MarkM-

[K1773R]

Any botters around, maybe with source code of bots for various popular venues?

I have not really looked yet at how to bot web-based things such as via greasemonkey browser-plugins or whatever.

First I built eggdrop-based IRC bots, now I am working on a bot for the Crossciv "Freeciv Galactic Milieu" Crossfire-RPG server. (It is online in game as the character known as "Trader".)

It occurs to me that it ought not be hard to use shell scripts similar to those my eggdrop-based IRC bots call from tools such as MUD-clients so as to be able to bring Bitcoin capabilities into pretty much any MUD / MOO etc type of environment / app / game, and that might interest me to do if player population actually picked up at kingdoms.se MUD which is the only one I ever really stuck with.

Can anyone recommend good scriptable-bot free source code available for scripting web based games?

-MarkM-

--
See sample web based game at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/

Some years back i developed in the section of Bots and AI's (no frameworks/similiar).
I even developed some web based bots, there are 2 ways to implement it:
write software that manipulates the browser
write software that interacts directly with the game (http/https/etc based).

At the beginning manipulating the browser was the easiest way to do it, later i did only program the later kind (so called packet bots).

Just checked your "sample" game and i did develop some bots for xnova/similiar.

[markm]

It is probably best for web games to have a mode that does not waste bandwidth on crap the bots have no use for; a mode that just answers some simple query from the bot with some direct answer without wasting bandwidth on images and ads and so on that the bot has no use for nd that no human is going to see due to no human is at the computer at the time.

My frien'ds T.K.C. game, http://trollkeep.com/ , takes that approach.

-MarkM-

[bitfreak!]

I find it easier to not forbid bots in the first place.

I can understand why they forbid it in MMO's. It puts real players at a disadvantage because bots can run all day constantly mining resources and flood the game market. Especially when you're reading or manipulating the client code in some way. At least with color bots you're just reading the image on the screen (like your eyes do) and then mimicking the mouse and keyboard actions (like your hands would do).

I think it is stupid to have to rely on image recognition

It can actually be very powerful and robust. It's a lot harder for them to constantly change the graphics than it is for them to fix holes in the code which allows botters to exploit the game in a more fundamental way. They constantly look for and fix those holes all the time, making those types of bots obsolete very quickly. That is why the Villavu community has lasted so long, and have been botting Runescape for like 5 years or something now. Many other bots have come and gone, but they always remain.

[markm]

I don't want to cheat existing games, the only cheting I had in mind was to save hacking the source code of an open source game to build in npcs by instead running NPCs remotely.

Really this thing with the MUD is like that too, the proper way for an A.I. player to play is using only information other players have, not doing like freeciv's built in A.i.'s do which is cheat by looking at stuff they ought not be able to see. (They do stuff like knowing what units you have in your cities without having to move a spy unit to the city to spy on it, and knowing what is happening out of sight beyond their units lines of site and radar and such. And despite all their cheating they are still crappy opponents.)

It is kind of silly to waste time doing crap your computer could and thus probably should be doing for you. Your computer should be making games eqsier tp play, helping you play them, not helping big game companies waste away your time on grinding. It is probably more sensible really just to say "that will take you two weeks of grinding, so play some other character for two weeks while this one is assumed to grind" than to even bother actually running through the grind, were it not that by being out there grinding your character is an NPC out there for others to grind-upon. No monsters needed, the players are the monsters!

-MarkM-

[K1773R]

It is probably best for web games to have a mode that does not waste bandwidth on crap the bots have no use for; a mode that just answers some simple query from the bot with some direct answer without wasting bandwidth on images and ads and so on that the bot has no use for nd that no human is going to see due to no human is at the computer at the time.

My frien'ds T.K.C. game, http://trollkeep.com/ , takes that approach.

-MarkM-

then you should really create a packet based bot.