Lord of the Rings Oline bot Creation.

[TackyBotter]

Hey Guys ,

I'm new to the forum but not new to botting. Recently I started playing LOTRO for the basic reason that its free and i enjoy it. I have played many MMORPGS and just decided to take a break from the subscription nonsense for a time. Currently there is a bot called pwnagebot that works fairly well but its not readily maintained as much as I would like which I use on a fair basis. I have written quite a few autoit scripts for most of the games I play but nothing much greater than pixel detection. I have begun to study .net and want to create a bot for LOTRO. The first project I want to create is a tool that forces your character to Auto Face his targeted enemy. Autoface is something that has been left out of most newer mmo's because they fear botting but in turn only really hurt thier players and cause wrists to hurt . Enough rambling, how would I start learning how to do this. I know it will take a serious amount of time to learn, I am fully willing to accept this grind. I have read posts on reading game memory , log files etc but am still unclear on where to begin. If anyone can point me in the right direction so that I can begin to learn I would be most happy. If I can create an autoface tool then I will move on to trying to create a self navigating bot.

[SamPlay]

Hi,
be aware that it is difficult to guess what your skill in math/coding/... are, so do not feel insulted if what I tell in the following is obvious to you. I am not an expert but i have been coding a bot for HL1/CS since several years.
1. ABOUT .net:
All the bots I have seen are coded in C++( older ones ic C) or in some game specific language, usually close to C ( eg: unreal tournament which has also specific framework to exchane info with the engine, see also Omnibot) or generic scripting language like Lua. Using .net will get you into learning things that you will not need for FPS bots, and and it does not seem appropriate for speed reasons. My choice would be c++, unless the game engine forces you into its specific language.
2. AUTOFACE: what do you mean? a direction can be specified as a vector or a set of 2 angles; so understanding the one you are talking about being the direction given by the 2 points (PlayerPosition,TargetPosition)...
a. are you talking about the VIEWANGLES ( direction "of the eyes", ie center line of the field of view), meaning you want the bot to LOOK in the wished direction?
b.or is it the BODYANGLES ( the "facing"), like the torso for a human or the hull for a vehicle (there are 3 bodyangles yaw,pitch,roll but the 3rd one is assumed to be null when stating a "body" direction).
c. or is it the SPEEDANGLEs, ie the direction of speed ( current speed if not null, or wished speed if it is current is null but you intend to move forward).
3. once clear about the hereabove, you have to find into the game engine or the interface it provides to you as mod/bot coder how you can
- retrieve info ( the 2 positions)
- input an order for the adequat angles/vector ( the wished direction), computed from the 2 positions.
4.To try and be more "human player-controlled" like, bot code usually add some filtering between the straight computation of the wished direction and the one actually input in the game engine ( 90% of the time it is "spring and damper" system). I would guess all bots on this site do that in one form or another. This also mean that, like any time you deal with a dynamic system, you need a Bot data structure to store and carry over some data over one frame to the other ( for each bot), as well as being able to retrieve the GAME time elapsed between 2 frames ( or an expected or approximated value).

Hope this is of some help.
If you are more specific, maybe we can help better ( though AFAIK Lord of the rings has never been addressedon this site).