Tinker - Warcraft 3 HostBot

06-29-2008, 04:39 AM

Tinker is a bot capable of hosting warcraft 3 games, and related tasks. It is written in vb.net. It currently requires .net 4.0 (release candidate as of this writing).

Future Plans
- Hosting saved games
- Support for MMD
- Relay games: forward joiners to games not hosted by the bot

Notes
- If you can't host, the bot can't host (when run from your computer). Did you try portforward.com ?
- The bot requires a valid cd key to work. You can't login at the same time as the bot using the same cd key.
- Blizzard has a public anti-third-party-tools stance, but their actions don't seem hostile towards hosting bots.

Usage
Download the attached zip, extract it, run the installer, and read the usage manual that was extracted beside the installer. Devs can get the source code from http://github.com/Strilanc. The map info grabber is only needed if you can't host and want to upload a map to the bot through wc3 when you can't host.

Example
Host a game of castle fight, with slots pre-setup for 4v4 and the top slot reserved for you:

Code:

!host name=<Castle Fight!!> map=castle*1.14b -t=4v4 -r

Breakdown of the command:
- host is the name of the command. It is used for easily creating a game server and advertising the game on battle.net.
- name=<Castle Fight!!> specifies the name that shows up in the games list. The <> are needed because this argument contains a space, and the name= part is required to avoid confusing it with the map argument.
- map=castle*1.14b is a search term used to find the castle fight map via the filename. It means "match any filename that includes 'castle' followed by anything followed by '1.14b'".
- [b]-t=4v4[b] is an optional argument and a shorthand for -teams=4v4. It means team 1 and team 2 will initially have 4 open slots for players.
- -r is an optional argument and a shorthand for -reserve=your_name, which reserves the first available slot for you [or anyone name spoofing you, I guess].

History

Hidden information:

Source Code: http://github.com/Strilanc

Attachment Descriptions
-Tinker Setup: Installs tinker program and dependencies
-Wc3MapInfoGrabber: Tool to grab HostMapInfo packet data, which is needed for one of the steps involved in uploading a map to the bot via wc3 (when you can't host).

Attached Images

Tinker.png (3.2 KB)

Attached Files

	Wc3MapInfoGrabber.zip (10.3 KB)
	Tinker Setup - Feb 10, 2010 - uses .net 4 beta 2.zip (673.8 KB)

07-02-2008, 07:37 PM	#2
Strilanc	No comments? Has anyone perused the code? Is it understandable to you?

07-03-2008, 04:15 AM

BlacKDicK

Quote:

No comments?

Has anyone perused the code? Is it understandable to you?

I downloaded the src. It is understandable (well, at least to me).
I just did not have the time to play with it yet. I'm involved with Ion in developing some cool plugin system for Grimoire, to make things easier for .Net developers. Besides, this new patch messed up A LOT, so a lot of work will be needed before Grimoire starts working with 1.22.

Grats for this app. Pretty good BTW.

07-04-2008, 05:32 AM	#4
PandaMine	If this could be ported for linux that would be aweasome, because there is currently a bug in wine where you cant host

07-04-2008, 05:53 AM	#5
Av3n	So i guess this works for v1.22 as well... -Av3n

07-04-2008, 06:36 AM	#6
Strilanc	I'm actually not sure if it works with v1.22. It reports the wrong to battle.net, but the hashes will be correct (it kept working through the last patch). Assuming they didn't actually change any of the client-server interactions, it should still work. It's written in VB, which unfortunately kills any change of porting to linux unless it works with mono.

07-04-2008, 06:51 AM	#7
Rising_Dusk	There are a lot more abuses in hosting on BNet that you can play with, you should keep looking, it's fun. Blizzard still hasn't fixed the one that can shut BNet down on entire servers yet. Additionally, did you know that you can host on all 4 servers at once? :)

07-04-2008, 09:50 AM

Strilanc

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rising_Dusk

There are a lot more abuses in hosting on BNet that you can play with, you should keep looking, it's fun. Blizzard still hasn't fixed the one that can shut BNet down on entire servers yet.

Additionally, did you know that you can host on all 4 servers at once? :)

I assume you're talking about having a bot join every game (with "DOTA" in name) at once again and again so they're all full of bots all the time. Denial of Service. But the fact that you say blizzard can fix it makes it sound like it may be something else, since they can't do anything about what I just described.

I didn't consider putting the game in all 4 lists at once... interesting idea. Mix people from different servers (since all bnet really does is advertise your ip address and port).

09-07-2008, 02:41 AM

Strilanc

I've updated the main post. New stuff is:
- Parsing is done at a higher level, which allows me to print off all the values in a packet. So it shows you exactly what it's sending and receiving from bnet. [Check out the new screenshot]. This also makes debugging comm problems MUCH easier.
- No more need for sniffing hex keys. It can compute that value now [thanks to way too much effort on my part].
- More settings.
- Remote commands have been tinkered with. It now has a reasonable permission model.

I can't test it a lot [no hosting here], so if you catch any bugs, let me know.

09-07-2008, 07:55 AM	#10
Ammorth	It crashed when a player joined (the person had 255 download percent, so many a glitch from battle.net?) Also, to host without being in the game, do you just kick the bot?

09-07-2008, 02:37 PM

#11

Rising_Dusk

No, you just don't send BNet the packet saying that your host bot is in the game, so it doesn't think it is. This isn't a problem anyways, since the bot can't actually play the game.

You could actually have the bot in the game if you wanted running from the actual host's name. That's a bit trickier, but it allows you to properly render desynchs and so forth. (By giving you a place from which to do the checksums properly)

09-07-2008, 02:48 PM

#12

Strilanc

Looks like a pretty serious bug

. I can't test it until my "second" cd key isn't in use.

The 255 download percent means their download percent is unknown (question mark).

The bot doesn't use up a game slot. It essentially works the same way bnet does when hosting melee games. It's there, but not a player. The bot will auto-kick itself when the slot is needed.

My next project is getting it to work in-game, player to player downloads, and more fully separating the game lobby from the client [because you can have multiple clients advertising a single lobby on different servers].

09-07-2008, 04:05 PM	#13
masda70	This is probably a minor but it doesn't work with accounts that are in a clan. Apparently it doesn't know what to do with the CLAN_INFO packet or something.

09-07-2008, 04:25 PM

#14

Strilanc

Quote:

Originally Posted by masda70

This is probably a minor but it doesn't work with accounts that are in a clan. Apparently it doesn't know what to do with the CLAN_INFO packet or something.

Do you mean it shows a parse error (no parser for packet) when you get CLAN_INFO? That's normal. It ignores that packet, since it doesn't use that information.

(does it disconnect or crash when it happens? that would not be normal)

09-07-2008, 05:02 PM	#15
Ammorth	It has crashed a couple times while using. Is there a way to run in debug mode?