are hotspots necessary in profiles?

[odarn]

They certainly are in mesh files. As long as we do not have an application that could analyze graphical data and turn it into possible navigation paths, human input in the form of hotspots will remain necessary. But i wonder if we really need hotspots in profiles. Or at least, if we need them in every profile. Maybe sometimes the mesh file is enough to get things done? Look for instance at the human start zone:
I start in front of a questgiver. I have further no data or instructions in my memory. So, i take the quest which tells me to kill 5 worgs.
I can "sense" the worgs in the vicinity. I do not really need hotspots, i only have to get to the nearest to me each time, until i have killed the required number. Then i must return to the questgiver from wherever i am. There are no hostile mobs that i can sense, so i keep running in the direction of the questgiver. The fact that i do not have any specific hotspots to follow makes my itinerary completely random. It will depend on the number of other players how far i have to go and how soon i am finished with my quest.
Does my argumentation make sense? Please elaborate whatever your answer.

 

[Liferose]

I'm not really following what you're trying to say. There are no hotspots in the mesh files, they're basically as you worded the graphical data that gives the possible paths.

Meshing has nothing to do with the locations of game world entities. If I laid out a map of china, and showed you all of the surface area you could navigate through, would that show you where stuff is? Meshes have no correlation to npcs, and gameobjects aren't even loaded in Honorbuddy. Without knowing the exact way the bot does this, the bot simply has a database that knows where some objectives and npcs are, and it will automatically go there because it knows internally where they are. Quest Overrides are needed when the bot doesn't know because of new content, changed content, you need to be specific, ..etc. Profile writers should specify a large area where there are these desired Npc's, and then the bot handles everything else. If for example a player is killing all of the mobs you need, the bot will hopefully have all of the locations where they spawn mapped out and it will simply run and wait till one spawns. When honorbuddy notices a mob from its super high tech scanning array it kills it, and based on the targets around you then, kills those, making the itinerary rather random.

 

[odarn]

I took my info from how to create a mesh file. And there mesh files certainly contained hotspots, so I generalized, apparently wrongly, to meshing. For the rest I do not understand what your point is. I am not suggesting to do away with profiles altogether, but only asking the question whether hotspots are (always) necessary. Questsoverride, info over npc's, etc, are not an issue here. I do not have the impression that what you say shows that hotspots IN a profile are ALWAYS necessary.

 

[Liferose]

I took my info from how to create a mesh file. And there mesh files certainly contained hotspots, so I generalized, apparently wrongly, to meshing. For the rest I do not understand what your point is. I am not suggesting to do away with profiles altogether, but only asking the question whether hotspots are (always) necessary. Questsoverride, info over npc's, etc, are not an issue here. I do not have the impression that what you say shows that hotspots IN a profile are ALWAYS necessary.

That information is from the older Honorbuddy 1.0, and is completely irrelevant to what meshes are in Honorbuddy 2.0. QuestOverrides, NPC Info, and Internal Databases, are very needed information to understand if hotspots are always needed. Seeing as meshes these days have NOTHING to do with hotspots. If you're not interesting in reading about them the short answer is sometimes. The bot sometimes knows where things are, and sometimes doesn't. It's safest to add them anyway.

 

[odarn]

You apparently know a lot about a subject i have just started to set my teeth in, but it would be nice it you would not present it like a black box. I would be very interested in more information, and for that i am dependent on what this forum offers to new people. My experience so far is that hotspots very often are the cause of malfunctioning profiles, not to say bottish behavior. When i look at some xml files and the situations they are applied to i can't help but wonder at the necessity of hotspots. Now you admit yourself that they are not always necessary, but it would be nice to know when they are or they are not. Right now they play a central role in profile writing, and under the same token, probably in the detection efforts of Blizzard. So the discussion we are now having is everything but superfluous.

 

[zonpan2lol]

It's much more simple than he's putting it really.

If you are creating farming/grinding/gathering profiles then hotspots tell the bot where to GO, not where stuff is. If you are creating a questing profiles you won't be using the <Hotspot> tag, you would be using <RunTo>, <FlyTo> and <GoTo> followed by the X, Y and Z of the location.

In general, Hotspots mark the next place to go when the previous is reached.

Unless you are a heavy questing profile maker there should be no reason why you would edit or create a mesh file.

Go to the Guides sub-forum, there's a bunch of tutorials on how to create grinding and gathering profiles. Questing and Professionbuddy require more learning and research.

Edit: To answer the title: They are needed if you want the bot to move from place to place (excluding combat), if you want to control where it heads manually then there are no hotspots needed in the profile but then that'd be dumb since you'd be better off using Combat Bot or Tyral or something that doesn't use profiles.

 

[Liferose]

It's much more simple than he's putting it really.

If you are creating farming/grinding/gathering profiles then hotspots tell the bot where to GO, not where stuff is. If you are creating a questing profiles you won't be using the <Hotspot> tag, you would be using <RunTo>, <FlyTo> and <GoTo> followed by the X, Y and Z of the location.

In general, Hotspots mark the next place to go when the previous is reached.

Unless you are a heavy questing profile maker there should be no reason why you would edit or create a mesh file.

Go to the Guides sub-forum, there's a bunch of tutorials on how to create grinding and gathering profiles. Questing and Professionbuddy require more learning and research.

Edit: To answer the title: They are needed if you want the bot to move from place to place (excluding combat), if you want to control where it heads manually then there are no hotspots needed in the profile but then that'd be dumb since you'd be better off using Combat Bot or Tyral or something that doesn't use profiles.

It is simple for grinding/gathering profiles, and is best to think of it as a waypoint. However he mentioned a few Questing specific things I'm going to rant about them in relation to questing.

You WILL use hotspots in questing, in the special Quest Behaviors and in Quest Overrides (which can take up 2/3rds to half of the profile).

In terms of questing it's best to think of it as a desirable area, even though it will technically move around in a waypoint style. You can do things to randomize the hotspots mainly in the special behaviors using the QuestBehaviorCore but that's an entirely different and sadly undocumented story. There is no direct harm involved with overcompensating in terms of hotspots, but there is harm in hotspot malnutrition. The only way having too many hotspots is bad is if it wastes tons of time covering a very broad area or the profile writer goofed and it's running in a useless area.

It would be better if I knew your definition of malfunctioning. Id bet money it would be an improperly configured behavior or something similar. When you wouldn't need one is when the bot knows where the desirables are in the internal database. Simply put, if you just don't provide an override and test the profile you will easily find out if it can perform with no hotspots provided. The internal database might not always be accurate with the patch, including all of the desired area, or just plain missing. This can also be applied to <PickUp/TurnIn/> tags so it can find questgivers. The Wiki provides information and definitions for all of these little things (in my sig), and I don't have the willpower to explain all of them in here .

 

[odarn]

Thank you both for the info. As far as malfunctioning of the profiles is concerned, it seems that very often toons get stucked at a hotspot, and they only way to get it to go further is to stop HB, go further manually and restart HB. But i agree with the remark that it could as easily be behavior related. I thought that if profiles did not rely so heavily on hotspots and more on the ability of the toon to use in-game info, provided by wow and by HB, it would be sooner able to to find its way back when lost.

 

[odarn]

I was reading "Profile Writing: The Future of Profile Writing" Profile Writing: The Future of Profile Writing - Buddy Wiki, when i came very soon across this quote:
"Honorbuddy knows the locations of each NPC that it needs to interact with for quest PickUps and TurnIns. Its not a large step to completely eliminate need for all X/Y/Z coordinates within profiles." That is exactly waht iI meant with this thread, and I should not be surprised that HB's people thought about it much sooner. They did not need me to come along and point to the obvious. What is also obvious, even though a little bit less, is that profile writers make very little use of some basic techniques explained in "TreeSharp: Adopting a Behavior Tree Developer mindset" of the same wiki. This explains maybe why all the bots look so.. botty, and seem lacking any flexibility in the order in which they conduct the business. Of course profiles will remain linear for the most part, but those techniques could alleviate the botty aspect in a substantial way. Like I said to somebody in this forum, I have very patience for coding anymore, and for this I apologize deeply. This forum is not a theoretical platform where state-of-the-art techniques are dissected. It is a practical forum where people are looking for practical solutions to their botting problems. Still, It cannot hurt once in a while to look deeper into things.

 

[odarn]

I have edited a low level profile as a learning exercise, and i found out a very interesting thing. The fargodeep and the jasperlode mines in elwynn forest are very closely related. My toon quit the fargodeep area as soon as the mine was explored, but since it still had to get the gold dust and the candles, it went through bandits and kobolds infested regions to get those items! No need for a log, as there is nothing to see. I have not a single hotspot in the jasperlode area in this profile, so it had to come from the mesh system I suppose that is an extra argument for the utility of hotspots.
One would be the correcting of the navigation paths which are sometimes quite tricky (see rule1 and 13 in my thread the Turing Test).
The profile i am posting here is very simple, as few hotspots as possible, and it will not delete your quests or sell your items. It is for illustration only, it does not have any use but learning.

 

[chinajade]

I have not a single hotspot in the jasperlode area in this profile, so it had to come from the mesh system I suppose that is an extra argument for the utility of hotspots.

Hi, Odarn,

Just FYI...
The information comes from the WoWclient itself. It is the same information available to addons such as Carbonite that direct players to the hunting grounds that will achieve the quest goal.

The information is incorrect more than occasionally, and frequently outright misleading, so you should use it with caution.

cheers,
chinajade

 

[odarn]

Hi, Odarn,

Just FYI...
The information comes from the WoWclient itself. It is the same information available to addons such as Carbonite that direct players to the hunting grounds that will achieve the quest goal.

The information is incorrect more than occasionally, and frequently outright misleading, so you should use it with caution.

cheers,
chinajade

That is certainly good to know, and it does not surprise me from Blizzard one bit!