Game Utility Development
Ok, I have done alot of fruitless searching and need someone to point me in the right direction. First off, I do not want to develop a game. I want to develop third party utility programs to make playing online games "easier". And, I have no idea where to begin.
I have taken intro courses in VB, C, C++, Java, and am currently taking a data structures course using the Java language. I feel fairly confident with basic syntax and library use to an extent. But, for the life of me, I have no clue about how to go about getting one of my programs to talk to another program, especially one I don't have the source code for.
I would be extremely happy if I could, hmmm... make one of my characters take a single step or park my lumberjack next to a tree and have him chop wood, etc.
Ok, I hope this is enough to give you an idea at what I am looking to do and would appreciate any advice you might have, espcially stuff like what subject material books I should be reading, web sites, what libraries or classes I should be studying, etc.
And my apologies for the displayed frustration, I am just loosing a little faith in our school system, since I went back to school over two years ago part time and have not been able to start a project yet that I went to school in the first place for.
Hey, first off id suggest trying to create a game with your tools to get a idea for what you need.
The main thing is level editors, that let you position objects in the game, and set some of their options.
Lumberjacks chopping wood, you'll need a basic AI, which normally comes down to good scripting language intergration.
You'll need to define what you really want, are you trying to make a 2D tile set tool, 3D world editor, or whatever.
I haven't really done anything big, so this is a very rough idea.
My favourite Game programming site is gamedev.net, heaps of articles and a good forum.
Good luck!
Harley.
Hmm, hmm... Basicaly, you want to create a program that will help you to develop "robots" for online RPGs. I.e. a program (ROBOT) that will interact with a running instance of another one (RPG). Problem is that RPG was certainly not designed to be controlled externally. So don't worry about your programming knowledge. What you need here is serious *hacking* knowledge :-)
Some hints :
1) use your OS APIs to periodically grab screenshots of the RPG so your ROBOT can "view" what's happening.
2) use your OS APIs to simulate fake user actions on RPG (mouse move and key strokes) so your ROBOT can "control" the RPG.
3) create a local network proxy between the RPG and its server, and try to analyse the data flow. It is probably crypted and secured, but you may try to break the security. If you suceed, you will then have total control on RPG !
G'd luck
Yep, like lossendil indirectly already pointed out, you need to find out a protocol that you can use for communication.
I, however, would not stack the protocol on top of the screen output of the game, but get at the information that is sent over the network and act upon that.
For that, you woul need to check with your online world, since there is a lot of things going on that bear no resemblance with what's done in another virtual world.
If you are into hacking then you could watch the port that your game connects to and analyze what comes down the wire. You might be in luck if it's a simple textual MUD, since there is simply the text sent accross. Anything more than that... write your humble pleas to the game developers and ask for the network protocol.
Micks
