"Better late than never" is an apt response to finally having all this stuff.
A lot of these changes have been taking place the past few days because the Hearthbuddy bot also needs similar systems. Since things were pretty quiet before the 1.2.4 patch, there was finally time to go though and figure out how to make certain aspects of the project more accessible to devs. HB/DB support attaching the debugger to the bot to debug stuff, so we had to figure out what was different in the code EB was using to get it working.
The
new gui stuff is actually not supported by any of the other bots yet, due to the complications involved in trying to get it to work, but now that it has finally been worked out, it can be used there too, to improve the quality of stuff.
EB itself is in an awkward position when looking at a road map. It's been out for a year now, but everything before the past few months is now irrelevant. For all intent and purposes, EB has only been out a month now, since a working 1.2 version came out roughly a month ago. The past year has provided a lot of insight and challenges, but the constant rewriting has held the project back pretty far due to the game and client changes.
On one hand, users would love to see more features, better routines, and an overall more integrated solution provided to them by us. However, that's not what we really specialize in, and it's too much for one person to do, especially since it'd be closed source and part of the bot itself. That's the biggest reason why BasicGrindBot will stay basic and require a bunch of features tacked on; it does the community no good investing all the time into trying to make it the ultimate solution, when such a thing is near impossible in a game like this.
On the other hand, the aforementioned lack of guides and developer resources over the past 8-9 months before the new Beta was released was something that needed to be addressed if we're going to develop and promote the type of design we're using with our bots. As a result, the current design of having to use a bunch of plugins for additional features, as well as a really simplified bot design is required to avoid the case of simply not having anything usable, as the alternative would be to have it all in the bot itself, where users can't customize and devs can't access it (since the bot we provide can't be open source).
Looking at the big picture with the project, I don't see the current design being the future. The more moving parts you have (plugins), the more complicated and harder to maintain and extend the project will be. For the time being, it's certainly good enough, but it's not something I'd stick with. If everyone could code, it'd not be
as big of an issue, but even if everyone could code, the core problem of trying to have something that everyone could make use of would still exist.
My biggest focus will be trying to find a way to make dev more accessible for users, and find a way to work in a profile system in a way that works with this game, to avoid the need to resort to pure coding for everything. This game requires a more dynamic system than is required for a game like D3, for example, so a lot of the existing work and methods for the other buddy bots simply don't translate to this game. Better routine design is another big issue that is more unique to this game than others. While it's certainly possible to just code around everything this game throws at you, it's a really time consuming process, and trying to make enough people happy with what you provide if it's not modifiable is always an issue.
If users were able to add
content to an existing base, rather than
code, I think the bot could progress a lot further and faster as opposed to trying to have a few people code everything in a way that most likely won't last and requires massive code changes to achieve a wide variety of desired behavior. The real challenge will be finding a way to make this happen.
