Bots and other addons

Tahgtahv · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 12:56 am **Posts:** 251

This topic compliments the other poll on OHBot. Feel free to discuss the capabilites of OHBot here, or any other additions you would like to see (or would prefer NOT seeing) interfaced with the game. Each level of this poll with the exception of Other is meant to include all previous levels. Please note, ALL poll options are doable with the current level of fan knowledge.

Nalates · **Posted:** Wed Mar 31, 2010 3:18 pm

Using a robot with AI to run Zandi has been mentioned in the other thread. I think that would improve the game. To be able to have a more realistic conversation with him would be good. I remember my disappointment when I returned to ask him questions.

I suspect we will likely have a shortage of ResEng’s for the foreseeable future. Because individuals can edit chat logs and screen captures they are both questionable evidence in player complaints. Having bots around that could provide third party unbiased chat logs could be a good thing. As shards pop up they could fill a greeter roll when greeter-players are not available.

We have examples of how player controlled bots can be used from experience in Second Life. SL has an economy and of course bots have been used to take advantage of various aspects of the economy. Since there is an economy there is incentive for theft and bots have been used to steal. Fortunately we do not have that incentive in Uru.

Bots also fill numerous useful roles in SL. The main example of SL is that once the client side software goes open source the development of bots is relatively easy. The AI part of OHBOT is the impressive and challenging part of the development.

I suspect the creativity in Uru will lead to some uses we have yet to think of. I voted ‘Other’ for that reason.

Frestro · **Joined:** Thu Feb 11, 2010 12:51 pm **Posts:** 74

[Edit: Moved here from OHBot thread, that's why it's specifically about OHBot]
There used to be some kind of marker quest registry on the web. You could only learn about the marker missions there obviously, not retrieve them. If people provided him (or OHB) with marker quests, could OHBot relay them on request? (And perhaps there could be a registry on the OHBot page?)

I don't like to /shout in the cavern. English is not my first language and it feels obtrusive to me. I wouldn't mind pestering a bot about marker quests though.

Tahgtahv · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 12:56 am **Posts:** 251

I can't speak for OHBot, but yes, we could probably write a service that did this.

OHB · **Joined:** Wed Feb 10, 2010 12:28 am **Posts:** 1247

I voted 'Other'. I think full vault access is a bit too general. It's a pick and choose thing. There are a number of things that it would be great if MOUL had. For example, the ability to search for a player by name to find their KI without needing to reply on KI lists scattered around the internet (shameless plug: or OHBot's build-in KI lookup tool for in-cavern lookups).

There's a number of other things too that I'd like, but I'm not going to go into the specifics here for various reasons.

BAD · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 2:10 am **Posts:** 372

I voted other as well.

Any addition to the game no matter what it is needs to be handled on a case by case basis. There is no advantage to overly restrict, or open the vault completely to any fan made addition. I think a tier system of security would be best built for servers running MOULa. When that happens anyway.

Butch · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 1:27 am **Posts:** 107

There are a great number of possibilities for interfacing with the game client. Almost too many to list. And like everything else, it's really going to be case by case.
I would like a slightly better description of "full vault access." Should there be services exposed for accessing at least some of the information in the vault? Yes. How that actually gets done, well, that's going to be a sticking point.

Much like my thoughts on OHBot, the real issue here is going to be governance. The technical know how to do a lot of things is going come faster than the wisdom of when, how and if to do them. And that's going to take just as much heavy lifting and by more of the community than even the creation of good quality Ages.

Ed Oscuro · **Posted:** Sun Apr 04, 2010 5:02 am

No thanks, none of the above. Some slightly improved or extended KI functionality would be nice; it's kinda crusty but still a nice enough interface. I don't see how the changes require additional programs, though, just additional programming compiled *into* the game program. The OS part should take care of that really. I'm not in favor of Firefox-style "addons;" if the code is truly OS and somebody wants to create bots and the like, it won't really be possible to stop them, but if code updates can be done quickly enough, a "standard," somewhat configurable binary should be enough for me. Maybe people will want some kind of plugin functionality for special debugging / mapping / etc. functions but I think that could and probably should be avoided.

I think new bots absolutely do not belong in MOUL; anybody who has played other MMOs probably remembers how little of the surroundings is visible at times because of chat bubbles intruding on the space. Uru tackled that problem first by getting rid of the bubbles and secondly by letting the viewers act as bulletin boards. Nobody has a message so important that they need a user-like agent running around in circles flooding the chat channel 24/7 while they're not here. We *visit* the Cavern; we don't commercialize or dominate it.

DocOlanA · **Posted:** Sun Apr 04, 2010 5:09 am

My one caveat, as always, is nothing that breaks immersion, canon, or the IC experience for those of us who care about such things (and there are a lot of us.) Which honestly isn't all that restrictive. Laxman managed to create a lattice that makes the KIs function in English, we should as well. AI bots exist IRL, so they can exist here as well. Functions that allow our KIs access to 3rd party chat programs, Facebook, and Twitter would be awesome.

Ed Oscuro · **Posted:** Sun Apr 04, 2010 5:13 am

Getting spammed with links to Facebook, Twitter, and all the other "social networking" I don't use would be substantially less than awesome, not to pretend that being in-Cavern means being out of touch with the real world (Sharper's notebook put that one to rest) - something like extra "tabs" or whatever that can be ignored would be alright though. The first thing that has to be done is to remove some of the hard limits on space using the KI and viewers, and the in-game networking in general which really shouldn't be overlooked (it's a part of the game's puzzles after all).

I'm not sure what I think about "the ability to look up a player by KI or name;" that could be abused, though I know lots of people would make use of it. Again immersion is another possible factor: Do you have access to everybody's name when you enter a new town? Some people stay out of the phone books, and I always thought part of Uru was nudging people to make friends in-cavern with new people and add them to their buddy list that way. In any case, this doesn't strike me as something a bot is needed for.

AdamJohnso · **Posted:** Sun Apr 04, 2010 6:57 am

As a side note, my WhoM (the MOULa Who's Online) tool falls under the "Full Vault Access" category.

Ironically, I think that no addon should have complete vault access, but that's another topic complicated topic (I voted other).

Michael · **Posted:** Sun Apr 04, 2010 7:39 am

I'd have to go with "other" because I honestly don't care what gets interfaced into/with Uru as long as Cyan approves of it. Uru is their property so as long as they say it's OK, I'm good with it.

Nalates · **Posted:** Sun Apr 04, 2010 8:35 am

Since the basic game has read write access to the vault and we will have open source... seems we pretty much will have full access to the vault...

OHB · **Joined:** Wed Feb 10, 2010 12:28 am **Posts:** 1247

I'd love to see an web-based API...to control access to the vault. Applications get their own API key so issues can be dealt with. I'll even volunteer to create it.

Christian Walther · **Posted:** Sun Apr 04, 2010 3:30 pm

I don’t see why or how we should or could make a difference between “3rd party addons” and “game clients”.

Right now (to some extent), and even more so when the client and server source is released, we obviously have full vault access, but we may at some point have to lock that down somehow to prevent abuse.

Deciding what kinds of clients and add-ons are allowed, on a case-by-case basis, should fall into the responsibility of the server operators. If we can give them some tools to technically enforce their decisions to some extent, all the better.

Personally, I will feel most comfortable on a server that allows modified clients (I want to use my bugfixes even if they don’t make it into an “official” release), but otherwise takes a conservative approach – perhaps some well-behaved OHBots, but rather no cheating tools like (parts of) the Offline KI or KI-number-look-up-by-name.

Bots and other addons

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