Unkle Nuke

You will need only one realmd database, to keep all accounts for both servers in one place. So you only need one realm conf and realmd.exe. You will have two mangosd.conf files. In the mangosd.conf settings, make sure "bind IP" points to the machine where your servers are running. However, change the ports. If server 1 is running on the default port of 8085, set server 2 to use another port like 8086. Be sure to set "realmID" so each world is different. Also make sure that "setrealm" indicates the correct client expansion in each conf file. Be sure your world and characters databases are named differently for each server and edit their name and port numbers in the configs to match the servers. If you use AHBot or Playerbot, edit the confs for those, too! You will have two of each. Since you only need one realm login server, start everything in the order of realmd.exe, mangosd.exe for server 1, mangosd.exe for server 2. That should have everything working. Just pay attention to detail when naming the databases and configuring the ports each world will use.

That is good news. If PB sticks around this time, I shall withdraw my objection.

I think there may be a problem with that idea since blueboy publicly announced in the Playerbot forums that they were dropping MaNGOS and adopting Cmangos as the official core supported by the playerbot code. This was done within a week after Cmangos was established. I'm a big fan of Playerbot, but how do we officially endorse an addon that no longer supports us? I cast my vote for MaNGOLin. Bannor's MaNGOS server admin utility has been a part of this community almost since the beginning. His work is definitely worthy of more support from us!

After losing several developers, MaNGOS has very few people actively working. We have, maybe, one full-time dev for each of the various cores. We've tried to encourage other members to step forward and help, but with very poor results. We don't even have people willing to take time and learn, judging by the near zero participation in MaNGOS University. What do you all expect, that new devs will magically appear? MaNGOS is your community and your project. It belongs to us all, but it will never prosper if we don't accept some responsibility to make MaNGOS better. We need people to write code, documentation, tutorials and guides. No job is too small and everyone is urged to give a little extra.

I have most assuredly always been a big fan of your work, blueboy! You and your team have advanced Playerbot light-years beyond what its initial devs managed. It has grown into the one "must-have" core mod that any low-pop server admin would be crazy to pass up. I feel GMguy is equally useful on both large and small servers. For high-pop realms, GMguy can eliminate the drudgery of handling oft repeated tasks, such as auto-completing quests, which are simple, but tedious. For low-pop realms, it frees up the GM to continue play with his select group, rather than calling that dungeon run to a halt. For developers, it not only allows for easier tracking of broken quests, it also makes it simpler to discover when an update fixes a previously broken quest by there no longer being obvious trips to GMguy for that quest anymore. Perhaps some people don't understand that GMguy is to server admins what Playerbot is for regular players... a fantastic helper! It's been several weeks since I last adventured on my solo server, due to real life emergencies and a broken attempt at updating my custom XP installation DVD. My apologies for lack of real activity in any dev topics, but I plan to resume my feedback/nagging of Playerbot in the very near future. Until then, I hope others will step forward to help out and make GMguy as full-featured and powerful as Playerbot already is! As for the rest, I can only hope they're too busy enjoying all of your bots to offer feedback. However, the silent majority should all post a few good words for the Playerbot/GMguy team's awesome work. Give blueboy and company some love! New slogan: GMguy... your automated administrator!

Honestly, I am very surprised there has been such sparse commentary from users regarding GMguy. IMHO, it's an incredibly useful feature, once you have a list of broken quests to use with configuring the bot. It sure saves me the trouble of interrupting my game time, wading through a half-dozen GM commands to auto-complete a broken quest and hand out missing quest items. It's also less cumbersome than having to dredge through my database, flagging broken quests to auto-complete, and then rechecking every time there's a DB update released. Maybe the database editing is the preferred method? I see GM guy as a tool with greater potential. It could be expanded to include many more features, to automates tasks that otherwise must be dealt with the hard way. If you do decide to again eliminate GMguy from the Playerbot code, would it be too much to ask for you to split it back into its own branch for a little while, so those interested could archive this useful bot for their own servers?

In the interests of full disclosure, this link you posted appears to be a redirect to KickAss Torrents. Can you confirm that these guides in the share are from publically available sources online and not from book publishers?

That ScriptDev2 patch is for Git to work properly with having your ScriptDev2 repository reside inside your MaNGOS repository. It prevents SD2 from being mangled when you do pulls for MaNGOS and vice-versa.

I promise I will join, just as soon as I have the tools to do so. Reminds me of my youth, when I used to hang out on Undernet and eat floodbots for sport. :lol: mIRC was the most popular client for Windows, but I preferred pIRCh for its tabbed interface, a concept not widely known until Firefox came along, and the Perl-style scripting language that was more powerful than mIRCscript. (polargeek, you were a coder ahead of your time and under-appreciated.) I used to be a chanop on Starchat, but efnet and Undernet were my two favorite hangouts. It's a shame that IM ended the popularity of IRC. Back in the 90s, everyone used chatrooms... from hackers to housewives.

I would be happy to join in the fun, but typing in these forums with my phone keyboard sucks badly enough that I don't want to consider the nightmare it would be keeping up with a chatroom.

I think the MoP repository disappeared because it is still very much in early development and the game itself is still not officially released. Any code that exists is considered pre-alpha and may not even be in a working state If you really have the itch to tinker with it, and offer fixes, I'm sure asking politely will get you a link. Although, I could have sworn the MoP code was simply moved into a branch of the new MaNGOS Master (Cataclysm). Check there for a branch labeled "500" or "MoP".

Maybe this is a stupid question, but... Did you apply the Playerbot SQL updates to your database? Check your database tables, especially 'commands'. Listed among all the usual GM and player commands should also be the bot commands. If not, you either missed a PB SQL or applied it incorrectly.

I have wished the two projects could work together. So much more could be accomplished. Unfortunately, Playerbot and Playerbot AI have become very set in their methods. Merging the best parts of both would likely require an entirely new project started from scratch. If such a thing ever happens or does not, Playerbot AI is still a remarkable work and I am sure we will see greater things to come for it. Keep up the good work!

It may be a long time before I can clear some other work, but I will try to do a simple merge of Playerbot-AI with MaNGOS for classic WoW and Burning Crusade. After that is done, perhaps this will allow others to create proper backports. II would also clarify that blueboy's Playerbots are intended to work as a party with the player. This allows players to complete quests and dungeons requiring multiple players, up to 9 bots. It was my understanding that Playerbot-AI was created mainly for battlegrounds and arenas. Has the function of the bots been expanded to work also as players for quests and dungeons?

Makes me wish Android didn't have crap IRC clients! Soon as I get my computer back online, I will definitely dust off my old client and scripts!

That merge conflict means the Playerbot repo is a few revisions behind the MaNGOS repo. You can resolve any conflicts by hand, using git mergetool command or roll back your MaNGOS repo to the same revision as Playerbot, do the merge, then fast-forward your MaNGOS back to the current revision. Hate to say it, but learning how to properly patch your core means learning a few advanced Git commands and being comfortable with code tinkering. On the other hand, it opens up a world of possibilities by allowing you to add whatever features and customizations you like. Keep at it! It's worth the trouble.

Uh... hate to tell you this, bugeyed, since you made such a detailed post. Ike's Playerbot AI repo is an entirely separate project. It has no affiliation at all with blueboy's Playerbot or the new-ai branch of the portal development repo for Playerbot. It does cause a lot of confusion. Perhaps renaming Playerbot AI to Battlebot AI, or some other variation on the theme, would help. That's up to this project's leads. The original goal of Playerbot AI was to make it possible to populate battlegrounds and arenas with independent bots, allowing low-pop servers to engage in large-scale PvP. Unfortunately, the code-base is not compatible with blueboy's due to Ike's using a port from another core of a similar player bot project for his starting point.

Probably something as simple as a misplaced decimal point. If NASA can crash a space probe with the same error, then don't feel too silly. It's good to see you, again, blueboy!

Very glad to see MaNGOLin has returned as well. Good to have you with us again, Bannor! I hope this fresh start will bring your work even greater notice. For those of you that have been living under a rock on Mars, this is the best and only admin tool you will ever need for your MaNGOS server that is still actively maintained and developed. Others have come and gone, but the number one administrator app is right here!

Here's a scary thought... Someday, students at MIT could use Playerbot, with MaNGOS and WoW, to study artificial life in a virtual world. 8)

Regardless of what the "community" decides, you are free to modify MaNGOS in any way you like. That's the beauty of open source, it allows you to make changes. Even if few like your idea, it should not stop you from at least implementing it for your own use. It may be that others will also like it, once they have a chance to see it in action. History has shown that most new ideas were met with scorn and ridicule, at first. Do not allow others to discourage you from pursuing your passion. Imagine how this world would be without the electric light, airplane, telephone, and many other works if their creators had allowed the doubters to influence them.

I do recall that, once your profession had reached a certain level, the trainer would give you a quest that directed you to the next trainer. This is especially true for acquiring Master level, which usually required completing a very long quest chain. It may be those trainer quests are missing or broken, which points to yet another database error. The only exceptions to this, to the best of my knowledge, were mining, herbalism, and skinning, as Cala has said. Perhaps someone should run a diff between the Zero and One databases, to highlight any missing or incomplete parts. TBCDB is the best database for One, so I'd recommend that one as a template for corrections in Zero.

Although the MaNGOS sources can give you a general indication of how handshaking and validation is handled between a client and server, the exact methods used here may not apply to an LU server. It all really depends on the type of encryption used, the validation algorithm, how often it is invoked, and how many layers of security are embedded in the client-server interaction. I am nowhere near as expert in the inner workings of the encryption and its implementation for MaNGOS as someone like Vladimir or TheLuda. What I have gleaned from past information is the encryption is used mainly with initial connection to validate the authenticity of the client. Once decrypted, the key resides in client system memory to minimize the necessity of constantly running the encryption protocol. The method is simplified because MaNGOS does not implement Warden, which has its own layers of validation to prevent cheats that use packet editing and memory injection exploits. Depending on your intended use, the anti-cheat portion of the LU client-server may be dropped entirely, leaving you with only requiring a successful handshake and validation of the client upon connection to the server. I would most certainly keep every last packet you have, simply because you never know when your development will unlock some useful information from what appear to be "useless" packets at this time. A similar thing happened early in the WoW server scene. Nobody worried about Warden, so packet capture data that might have revealed its functions was never gathered. As a result, MaNGOS does not have Warden supported for the server that is used with the WoW 1.12 client. You may also wish to have a look at the Game Deception forums. They deal specifically with reverse-engineering games, including for the purpose of creating servers. It is very likely others have the same idea of creating an LU server, so you may be fortunate enough to find a great many more resources to help your studies. Keep in mind you are undertaking an enormous project that could literally eat up years of your life before you have a satisfactory result. However, nothing worth having is ever easy and you will learn so much more than you ever dreamed by getting your hands dirty and sticking with it. You will be pioneering techniques and code that will be used by others for years to come as they work upon their own Lego game servers. I envy you as you begin this journey. I wish you the best of luck!

Movemaps finally made it into the core? Thank you for this, MaNGOS team! And a big congratulations to faramir, qsa, and all the others who have contributed to the development! You guys have given MaNGOS one of the most useful additions since vmaps. All that hard work will be rewarded by the thousands of hours of game play made even more fun by the addition of Movemaps. Though you can never be thanked enough, and many will neglect to do so, the added joy of having an ever better server will stand as a monument to your efforts. This emphasizes the point, once more, as to why MaNGOS is the gold standard everyone else imitates. I wish we had ten more devs like you. Thank you, again, most sincerely.

Well, you could use the honor or xp reward system as a template for creating your gold system, you just need to have it apply to a party instead of an individual.