What i'd want to see in HB and an idea how we could get there

[laria]

Inspired by Pooks similiar thread about Singular i just wanted to do a more general one about HB itself

On the lower level:
- Gem Data should be exposed in more detail.
Gems currently only expose their color, which is just a rather vague hint at what stats they improve and by how much. Since relicts are considered a gem by the game, this deprives us of valuable information such as affected traits , itemlevel boost.

- wrap class order hall missions and champions in api, should be an extension of garrison api

- Coordinates should note the continent they are based on.
This 4th parameter, i would note it as W for "world" which should be optional to ensure backwards compatibility would help to create safe passage between the old and the new expansion content, which more and more overlaps as they send you back and forth.

- Expose and document the wowactors structure
This would help with certain quests a lot and reduce bruteforcing those.

- reveal info for pets in iteminfo
If we carry pets in your bags, we would like to know if we know it already, if we do, if we can learn an additional one as you can have up to three of a certain kind sometimes

- reveal previous rank known in iteminfo for recipes with ranks
since you can have a lot of different recipes with different ranks in your bags&banks, this info would be valuable.

- mark rivers ,lakes and sea with rough polygons and mark them as openwater or not.
This would allow us to dynamically find a valid fishing spot.

- Decrease the minimum mashable area , not just across the board as it is only needed on certain occasions as
towers and small rooftops, ropes, pillars and bars with chests on them.

- fix the LoS calculation for big bulky "floating" NPCs like Fallen Avatar, Helya, Helyas tentacles and Naraxus.
Having to do this in every routine and plugin again is wasted effort

- reveal final ends of auctions for both AH& Blackmarket

- allow for more kinds of portals
Right now we have support for "interact with" and "walk through" portals.
There are other types as gossip and more intresting those that you need to activate and then walk through
like the workshop in suramar.

- handle further distances for offmesh connections.
Right now portals can only cover small distances across neighbour tiles. This isn't always the case.
Mage portals for example.

Higher things:

- extend the talent system with the honor talents. Less unspent points, less annoying ingame tooltips "spent your stuff" and more survival during world quests.

- Make use of relicts to boost your weapon, could be as simple as use the relict with the highest ilvl boost and could be refined later with tables that assign certain traits an equivalent ilvl boost.

- Improve avoidance.
1) If you need to follow a certain npc in a distance to avoid being spotted you can get yourself into trouble
at a t-crossroad right now for example in Suramar City. The npc you follow goes left, you go right to stay away, then it comes towards you and you are stuck and spotted.

2) Seen both in Suramar city and on the new Argus content as well as the pandaran zone.
You need to cross a road with a big bulky nasty elite mob, instead of simply waiting a few seconds until the threat has passed, you run around like crazy or get totally stuck.
Doesn't look human after all.

- Cross continent travel.
Once we have the map/continent available, we should pass the logic how to change between them from the profiles to the core system. This stops duplicate efforts and makes sure that every profile&botbase has
access to the best possible method of transport.

- handle certain areas in 3d instead of 2.5
I know this is a big one and a lot of work involved, but looking at the suramar sea, certain underwater shipwrecks and caves in Valley of the 4 winds and Kalimdor, we do a very poor job at swimming.
CTM is slow and prone to errors.
I'd love to see some improvements here

- Attack and loot raremobs
if you can kill them and haven't already collected their loot, we should go for nearby raremobs and get their items.
- collect treasures along the way

Both of the above give us better gear.

- add weapon traits to the talent system
Having more dps and higher survivability certainly speeds up leveling.

- Take more into account if you have to swim across the water or can use a waterwalking ability/mount to cross it for pathing. swimming from Broken Shore to Suramar city really looks ugly. Flying or porting there might be a lot faster if not at least more natural.

- A modular approach to questing
Another big thing that i had in mind.
If we scripted quests independent of each other in a crowdsourced way and then had a central db of how each quest ties into another it would be possible to do quests in parralel
dynamic and different every time. Right now it is difficult to integrate class hall or profession or event quests into the leveling process. Natfoth and I were trying to do something like it before he disappeared.

- Improved vendor behaviour:
In addition to quality based selling you should keep in mind the level&itemlevel of the player
Selling epics is perfectly fine if you are a lvl 930 player doing world quests that give 865 ilvl items.
Selling white items is perfectly ok, if it is starlight dust which is worthless.







So having stated all this i am quite aware that the team size has shrunk and it requires someone to code these and other things.
Buddybots have switched to a subscription based payment system and people are unhappy about the increase in money they have to spent for their leisure time acticity already, but
how about crowdfunding improvements?
I have no idea on how much time and therefore money is required to get improvements in the core that would benefit all people, but it might be suitable for the greater good of all botters involved.

What do you want to see done?
Would you be willing to spend a little bit of money for it, if so how much?

 

[pookthetook]

After Singular, I'll help! Just pay me in tacos.
mmm...tacos.

I'd like for Gatherbuddy and Questing to get some additions and a new paint job.
- I'd like questing to turn more into a scripting bot (barely anyone uses it for actual quests vs random everything else). Also more than just the one setting in the ui.
- Questing should have a way to deal with profile settings and config uis without the hackish adding-a-button-and-parsing-xaml-strings stuff I do
- Get rid of needing <Code File="..." and <CustomBehavior File="..." just use the file name for the tag. <RunCode .../> <InteractWith .../> etc..
- Include all of the features of my ProfileCompiler tool. It handles custom directives (like Angular {{variable}} syntax), and 'compiles' a profile that can include C#, Lua, and other XML files and snippets.

Get rid of WinForms and those property lists. Give me a xaml compiler for local builds.

Stop shipping botbases/profiles/singular with the bot and use the store - default stream for everyone. That would enable them to be updated out of band without waiting for the next hb version. Like Echo's quest profiles (which have 0 need to be shipped with the bot zip anymore as they're outdated compared to store stream or GitHub).
Embrace DevOps with rapid iterations, continuous deployment, and directly using user feedback to influence the backlog and priorities.

I think all of the shipped botbases and things should be open source. Closed source, they're only modifiable by core devs and things go requested for years and never happen. People like me don't have access to do anything about it either.

Guides are old, HB wiki is dead, docs are fail, and good botbase samples are nonexistant, most things are old and dirty (Singular still uses behavior trees and is a mess). Tutorials are written by people that really don't know wtf they're doing themselves. Microsoft invests heavily in their new documentation. They have a lot of "Developer Advocates" to teach people and create samples. Do that too.

 

[laria]

The problem is not that it is not opensource enough, Routines, sample plugins and a lot of profile give you a huge ressource to learn from. Each API has it is limitations though and then it gets tough

 

[pookthetook]

Resources to learn from for those, but not botbases. If they were open, we could help and leave core devs to focus on shiny new api things.
I don't have access to help otherwise

 

[mh66]

Just one remark regarding Microsoft documentation:

In order to understand what they are showing, there's a lot of knowledge already needed; everyone being skilled in coding knows, they aquired those skills themselves as coding in school or those documentations won't use proper brain-friendly approaches and are usually tremendously boring.

I always recommend going to codecademy.com and solve those clever puzzle like tasks for java as c# and java are quite similar. If someone has the skills, time, dedication, etc. to build up something like codecademy.com for HB this would revive this almost dead community quite rapidly.

 

[pookthetook]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tutorials/with-visual-studio

https://www.microsoft.com/net/tutorials/csharp/getting-started
You don't need any knowledge. For the second on, you don't even have to leave the browser to learn and play with code.

 

[marrvin]

I do not know if this is technically possible but I would love to see
- a method to log onto anonther character without closing the client and restarting HB.
even if limited to same class/specc it would allow for multi character profiles when crafting / auctioning / gathering etc...

 

[mh66]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tutorials/with-visual-studio

https://www.microsoft.com/net/tutorials/csharp/getting-started

You don't need any knowledge. You don't even have to leave the browser to learn.

Those are still boring; no possibility to solve tasks, to be part of it, playing around. That's how you learn the best (and most fun).
Those are like books with pseudo interactive elements; this is not how learning works.

"Projects" on codecademy.com:
https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-java

 

[pookthetook]

I feel like I'm hijacking your thread, sorry laria ^_^;
marrvin, that's possible now. Use the InGame_Check hook to log out, and some lua to switch characters and log in.

I'd love to see where HB can handle different classes when changing characters though.
I'd go from DK to DH to Druid, etc.. Would be neat.

 

[evilseed]

Ohh boy pass that bong over to me Piekaboo? DevOps --> Agile?

 

[mh66]

What I'd like to see in the future:

A smarter Flightor; just had a situation where char was flying in OG back and forth for minutes because flightor wasn't able to get from cleft of shadows to flightmaster. There are lot of those very unsmart behaviours

 

[DarrellCor]

What I'd like to see in the future:

A smarter Flightor; just had a situation where char was flying in OG back and forth for minutes because flightor wasn't able to get from cleft of shadows to flightmaster. There are lot of those very unsmart behaviours

This sounds like a good idea to me. They can be pretty dumb at times.

 

[Rayze]

imo, the feature I miss the most is a final end auction botbase like you said. As I'm a software developer, I spend a few hours of my free time to make a working auction botbase (compatible with TSM). It's currently in the testing state but I only need those last minor features for a "basic" auction bot (more features are planned in the future).
Maybe this helps, reviving the HB community.

 

[roifok]

WE WANT GREEDY BACK !

Any chance the src files are stored in buddy dev secret folder ?

 

[nucleotides]

To be honest after my 1 year is up I don't really plan to reup my subscription unless the stuff they have works much better than it does. Questing is getting some love, dungeons need it, lfr was abandoned. for the roughly 150 bucks a year to maintain a subscription I want to be able to do a lot more without hoping that someone in the community picks up the slack like worldquest and suramar (we told it would be supported and never was).

Many what has been said would help but at least current content support would be nice. I cannot pinpoint what will be the exact breaking point for me but as of now I don't see the value.

 

[Aion]

To be honest after my 1 year is up I don't really plan to reup my subscription unless the stuff they have works much better than it does. Questing is getting some love, dungeons need it, lfr was abandoned.

LFR received great love from Highvoltz recently.
He fully scripted all the LFR wings in August and bumped beta tests on the forum and the HB discord as well. So once HB is up again, I suppose we would have all LFR wings released for rush

 

[Monomatapa]

I am no programmer, so forgive me if I write something stupid. I have though an idea for limiting the downtime in case of a patch.

Wouldn't it be possible to make the bot more modular in its structure?
That way you could after a new patch, release the bot with unfinished parts disabled.
I'm sure that the combat routines are the most used, and the most missed parts of HB, so you could work on the Combat bot first, and than release step by step the other parts....

 

[laria]

We need a better handling for protected and forcemail items.
If it comes down to people manually editing an xml, we tend to miss things like the flasks for Legion.
If you reach a certain level you do no longer want to keep certain items in your bags like low level potions or herbs that do not sell.
A GUI would be nice so you can check & uncheck things and add them yourself in a graphical way
Vantus runes are also not protected so far

It would be nice if we could forcemail & protect items by itemlevel and type.
The amount of AP boost items grows all the time and it would be a lot cleaner if we just say "don't sell AP boost items" instead of listing every id for all of the 544 items in a single line.

 

[laria]

- Camera offsets in the HB API so other people can work on overlay plugins without depending on someone that can provide updates for each new wow version.

internal enum CameraOffsets

{

    WorldFrame = 0x01193E30 - 0x400000,

    WorldFrameCameraOffset = 0x7610,

    CGCameraFov1 = 0x138,

    CGCameraFov2 = 0x38,

}

- A converter in the devtools between ingame XY and HB compatible world coordinates

 

[laria]

VariantIDs for questgiver and turnin

Blizzard likes to make quests copies that only differ in small details, faction or class for example.
This is already handled.

To extend this we need to handle questgivers&turnins with different ids:
Based on progress in the chain and other events, you can have a different copy of a certain npc or a totally different one on the turn in location.
Same can be expected for the questgiver id.


Collect Ancient Mana like Herb & Ore

If you run around in suramar , collecting ancient mana from crystals would help a lot with unlocking reputation and other quests as well as the thirsty npcs

Make IncomingHeals part of the HB API

Singular still uses StyxWoW.MemoryRead
in
LocalGetPredictedHealth()
LocalGetPredictedHealthDebug()
LocalGetPredictedHealthPercent()
IncomingHeal()

Having those in HB API would certainly help to avoid errors and manual updates

Get rid of StyxMemoryRead in QBs

ShowVehicleArticulationChain in QBCDebug for example