Thursday, November 29, 2007

Status Update

It's been a short while since my last update. Things have been pretty hectic around here, I have to say. Rise of Kunark really screwed us over in terms of Evercraft's compatibility with the game, though the changes that were made seem to be for the greater good. In particular the auto-configuring hotbar on the tradeskill window is especially helpful to us (as well as to all the non-macro crafters out there), which can only be a good thing.

In response to RoK's release, we've made several changes to Evercraft that amount to essentially a band-aid on the gunshot wound... We removed the Hotkey Setup step, taking full use of the new hotbar. We also did the Vista users a favor and changed the Coordinate Setup system such that it is *much* faster - near instant on Vista and XP machines alike. As a consequence of this change, Coordinate Setup is also easier to use - you don't need to mouse-over the white box anymore, and because we perform Coordinate Setup at the beginning of each job, the tradeskill window itself can be moved around - no more frustration! =)

The harvest bot beta was also disrupted by the RoK release, in particular the fact that the memory data collected was no longer correct, and with SOE's habit of patching on a daily basis for two weeks after a major release it made little sense to try and collect that data again until the game was more stable. I only recently got the bot running again, just in time to release the next version yesterday. As far as the hunter bot goes, I'm not sure what Faldo's progress on that is - which is a shame since I'm really anxious to see it working.

Work on the new pathing system is pretty much at a standstill while Evercraft is being worked on. All my proofs of concept still function and are relevant, but I just haven't had the time to devote to it. As such, I think I'm going to go against the majority of my beta testers (who have expressed the desire that I delay the release of the harvest bot in order to get the new pather working) and release the bot (once finished) with the walkpath pather instead.

One thing I am devoting some time to, however, is the next version of Autocrat, which will be built on top of the .NET Framework 3.5. Autocrat35 will be a massive improvement over the current version, but mostly in terms of developer productivity - that is to say, it'll take *much* less time to get something out the door with this version.

So that's been my life lately. =P Sorry for not updating sooner - just hasn't been on my mind until recently.

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Bot testing has begun

After having my beta testers successfully test the various bits of tech that go into EverHarvest, I've decided to go ahead and release a command-line version of the harvest bot. This is the first time an actual harvest bot has been available from Macrocrafter.com, and I'm pretty proud of it so far. I've been using it personally for about two weeks while debugging and tweaking, and in that time it's made me about 10 plat, just from selling off the stuff I've harvested while testing... Pretty crazy. I hope everyone else has similar success.

This also means that I'm officially no longer taking beta applications for this iteration of the bot. Once the next version pops up, I might re-open applications, but that will depend on how many of my current beta testers decide to stay on the post-release beta team.

So where do we go from here?

Good question. Once the bot is released, there is still a ton of work to be done - I will be completely replacing the current walkpath-driven system with an intelligent pathfinder (as discussed in a previous entry). Additionally, there will be tweaks, bug fixes (even the most rigorous testing misses the ones that scurry behind the walls), and new features that I haven't even though of yet. Plus, there's data-collection to be done - the intelligent pathfinder will only be intelligent because it will have knowledge of the layout of zones - knowledge that we (more likely I, if I can't farm some of it out) will have to provide it with.

So... That's about it this update. More later. =)