Wicca

I've seen this exploit in action and seen it reproduced. After I get back what I lost, I will explain it all, how it works, how to stop it from working.

I have, as others have now, located a very big bug that can cause people to loose a LOT (all) of their money. By now others have found it. For now, until I can recover what was lost, if it is even recoverable, I won't talk about the exploit. I suggest others stop using it, that have discovered it, because it just will cause headaches for people. More to follow.

This list is very out of date and then becomes biased. The refresh should be more frequent and it should be random, else it only reflects favored bots at favored times.

Well, first thing is to gather ALL of the strings you'll be sending out from iknow, and put them into one file, so you know what you need translated. Leave in the %s and %d format stuff, too. Then email that string list to people that are willing to translate from English to the various languages. The trick here is, of course, getting a complete list of ALL the strings iknow will ever use. Because you don't want to have to come back later for additional translations...you wanna do it all at one time because people generally will only help once. Your milage may vary. In Qore, the programming language I'm using for my bot, I did this: $language = hash(); # Similar to an array $language.ENGLISH.str1 = "Hello, %s, how can I help you today?"; $language.ENGLISH.str2 = "You owe just %d more Gold Coins"; ... and so on ... for all the known strings he sends to people. When they change their language, with some lang command, you go: $actor.$id.language = $users_new_language; ELprintf("Your new language is %s", $users_new_language); and so on

I think iknow could speak in a variety of languages. After a while, the strings that iknow says could be collected into an array and referenced based on the users language selection. I've been doing this on a bot I'm working on recently. People seem happy to help translate for such a project, and likewise people like to use their language with bots, I've discovered. Maybe this is a good idea for iknow, too.

My last bot loaded Tcl scripts and ran them. Those scripts defined the actions of the bot, with regard to the data that comes from the server. This might be a cool idea for you to implement, because it means the base class of the bot never changes, and each bot owner can write their own Tcl (or Perl or Python or Qore) scripts. There could be Tcl scripts for trading, for email, for anything, but the idea is that the base class never changes and loading Tcl scripts makes it super easy for non-programmers to add features to the bot. Tcl easily merges with C and was designed to be added to applications that want to load scripts to call the parents functions and stuph. Daz my 2 cents. Oh... maybe also some of these commands: ping dance follow me sit stand turn left forward and now for the coolest command I ever wrote that you'll all like that iknow would be fun to have: admire The admire command lets you send an anonymous message to someone you like. That person will get a message from iknow that says "You have a secret admirer!" and then if that person also uses the admire command, and they name the correct person, a match will be made. The admire command can also contain a string argument: /iknow admire Sandcastle I think yer cool. would send: PM from iknow: You have a secret admirer! They said "I think yer cool." Anyway, if iknow will be both informational and entertaining, he could do as red (the bot) does and hold death bags. Simple.. if a bag pops up on the map, iknow goes to it and waits over it fi it contains death-ish items, like a sword or gold. If it doesn't, he moves off the bag. Red has saved several bags for people in this way. This might be a fun idea for iknow, too. last I knew, using Verison or Cingular or whatever cell phone service was free to Text from the web. years ago I wrote an irc script that incorporated the feature. It's really pretty easy to do with a http_get and put procedure. With this, you can have iknow cell phone text people with some information. Just an idea. And free. okay, that's all.

I don't know what the solution is, but I can tell you the reason this happens. When you log in, several packets of information are sent to you. Things like the list of players and their locations, the location of all the teleports, and the entire list of bags on that island. The problem is, sometimes, for unknown reasons, that list of bags is not complete. I've seen it from a raw form, and it seems that one bag can be excluded from the list. I've never seen 2 bags or more excluded...only 1. There seems to be a mismatch between the list of known bags, and the list of bags the client remembers when it was last logged in. First of all, the server needs to send the entire list of bags, and not omit any. This is the real source of the problem. It explains also why some people can pick up bags, and others can not. It is because person-1 received the entire list of bags, but person-2 did not. As I said, it is usualy no more than one bag omitted from the list. There are some possible solutions, like checksums from the client, not just for bags, but for all lists sent. How do I know the list is incomplete? Because the client is also informed when a bag dissapears. I have some code that tracks the bag list against the bags as they dissapear. Sometimes a bag will dissapear that never existed. It never existed because my cleint was never informed it existed...but it actually did exist, because it later dissapeared. Perhaps a checksum could some day be added to lists sent from the server. Another option is to restrict the radius of bags that a client is informed of, thus shortening the list, similar to the restricted radius od add_new_enhanced_actor and stuff. The actual server side reason this happens is probably quite interesting and might be difficult to ever fix perfectly.

A twisted variation of this is just to allow a special TO-SERVER packet that lets approved bots pop up a window on the client. Just like the NPC's do. Then not only can you have a newspaper as a pop-up like the NPC's have, but maybe other bots can use it as well for cleaner trading. All sorts of things are then possible, like the foundation of warning bulletins, guild map welcomes, better away-messages. I dunno.

In the newest Linux client, I have seen a reproducable bug in the trade system. I haven't read about this anywhere else, and I don't know why. Here's what happens: Client-1 loads cells 0 through 3 with items of random quantities. Client-2 loads a few cells too. Client-1 removes quantity from the first cell (cell 0) until a zero quantity is reached At this point, as it should, the client pushes the higher items on the table, down to start at cell 0 Now, if Client-1 tries to remove quantity from cell 0 it will Not remove that quantity. However, if Client-1 clicks cell 1 (the second cell on the table), it will remove quantity from cell 0, as if you were actually clicking on cell 0 (but you aren't, you are clicking cell 1) The problem seems that the Linux client forgot to push the data for the trade table down, as it did with the images. The images are correctly pushed down when a lower cell becomes empty. But the data that is connected to those images does not get pushed down. In fact, I can click on cell 5 to get cell 4 quantity to be removed. Anyone else experience this? I tested this against a correctly working bot, and when I couldn't believe it, I tested 2 Linux clients against each other to verify. vmlinuz-2.6.12-1.1456_FC4, gforce-2

I'm just wondering...maybe someone knows...but there are some online games that have continents that are just huge, and trees and plants and hills with elevations and stuff, but they were computer generated. I'm wondering if someone has tried to generate a map using some A.I. concepts. Like, computer generate a flat grid, add random (seemingly) hills, add seemingly random trees and clumps of houses and lakes, and use some A.I. methods to do this. The way the brain works, there can be an argument made for this kind of map creation to challenge human expectations when exploring. In a way, a map could be created and the final outcome would be unknown even to the computer program that generated it, until it was actually done. Um...this is how some other online games create maps, so I always wondered about this for EL. I'd be curious what AI fans think of this.

This has always been my assumption! Yes... all via text PM's. That is all, really. I think this is a great idea. I'm always playing with bots on EL and it would be a blast to have my experiments join a bot guild or channel and just even do general handshaking. This is just a fun idea. If someone selects a channel and a "protocol", then it would be a lot of fun. I've never thought it would be a server packet thing. That certainly would be overkill I love the idea of a standard protocol and a standard channel. If the channel was public, it would be easy to implement some sort of handshaking so the bots know who is a fellow bot and who is a human trying to fool the bots.

I think a lot of things are silly too. But I think it's important to support new ideas. A lot of you that post here are great programmers and people look up to you for support of their ideas. I'm not saying support every idea blindly. I'm saying if it doesn't clearly and obviously harm the game, then why not say "Hey man, that's a new idea, go for it and let's see what happens with it."

Bots can harvest and use map data then?

The Ants have to do more than just send move packets. They also have to know if they have moved to a real location. They do this by asking the server where they are. Then the server sends back a location. If you count this up, and do it every few seconds, what you have is a lot of bandwidth. Now multiply it by the number of Ants. This was the situation in the early days of the Ants. The users see the map, and they know where to go, and where not to go, but the Ant, in the beginning, must go to a location, and check to see if He/She arrived there. (Since it is not legal to use EL map data, as stated several times). So either 1) Someone broke the rules, big time, or 2) The Ants hog bandwidth. There is a lot more going on than just goto packets. This doesn't even include the traffic needed to open bags, extract items, and deposit them in other locations. All of this takes bandwidth. The bandwidth question becomes null and void because of the Ants and the Guild messanger bots. This guys new idea to build a protocol for bot-to-bot traffic is great, and so far I'm not seeing any reasons not to support him and his protocol.

You've found one of the reasons to promote this guys new protocol idea. You said the messanger bots were replaced with the #ig command. You see, the messanger bots were someones idea at first. Such a good idea that it became part of the game. This is the very reason why we should promote and support new ideas like this guys protocol for interbot messages. If the guild messanger bot idea was rejected in the beginning, then it would never have become a feature it is today. If someone vetoed the guild bots in the first week of operation because it used bandwidth, then where would the #ig command be today? What if we said guild messages could only be sent from ip address to ip addresss? As to the question about how much a new capability will enhance gameplay: This interbot protocol would allow people to have access to information about players, guilds, chat traffic, trade information, and much more, on devices and networks outside of EL. It would allow trade bots to synch buy and sell prices, too. There are things that could be done with this idea that are frighteningly cool.