| 05-12-2008, 08:39 AM | #1 |
Ok now I got this idea about moving RPGs to the next level. It would involve creating both a map and a hosting bot. Basically the bot will host the map all day long (probably several games at the same time) and probably will spam the current open games on a certain channel. The bot will differ from the typical hostbot to allow communication between the program and the game. To send a message from a player to the program either the player types message in chat, to send a message from the game to the program, the game uses game cache or something similar (I'm sure theres a way to make the data you want appear in network traffic). To send a message from the program to the game, the program will emulate a chat command event with specific data. Also the program will not forward the passwords to other players (I'm pretty sure thats possible without causing desynch). And, with a certain amount of coding you can achieve the following advantages: 1. There will be no need for save/load codes since players login via a password and the hosting program looks up player data in a database and sends it back into the game. This should also eliminate cheating if done properly (at least make it as safe as typical non-wc3 RPG's). 2. It will be possible to synchronise the games to some extent, e.g. creating clans which was very limited in traditional save/load code RPGs. I could list more I guess.. Hope I presented my idea clearly enough. Comments please, maybe some techinical details I'm not aware of that present difficulties or make it impossible to implement this? EDIT: I just found out that some of my assumptions on wc3 networking are far from truth but I still hope that this is possible. |
| 05-12-2008, 09:16 AM | #2 |
Its interesting, and pretty cool. Basicly using B-net to host ur own little server =P, but im not realy sure how you could get the text to go from game to external files., and vice versa. Unless you could use the game cache, as you said... Maybe you could use a colour recognition system for the bot to pick up different codes and letters. It doesnt sound like it would be too hard to do, even with the colour recognition insted of cache. I would like to see this, maybe start working on an external program to do this, then we could use it for SC2 aswell. I hope some pro coders post here, this would be realy cool to see in action! |
| 05-12-2008, 09:26 AM | #3 |
1. Ok, not game cache, theres some thing known as SyncStoredInteger. I [assume] the received data is pretty similar to what goes into replays, and it is possible to write specific data into replay via jass (dota does that: when the game ends the player score goes into the replay via SyncStoredInteger). 2. To send the info from external program to the game you just need to send a chat command action (again, if some of my [assumptions] are correct). It's not displayed on screen so you can put a lot of data in there without worrying about confusing players, and it can be handled with trigger that would parse it. 3. Color parsing is not what we need, since we don't want the information to be displayed to players (because (a) there can simply be too much of it and (b) the host player will not actually wc3, only the bot. |
