That's awesome! It made me a bit nostalgic, thinking back to the first program I ever wrote. It was a WoW bot that walked between the mailbox and the auction house, manipulating auction prices. The bot would drive the glyph prices to the bottom by lowering the lowest price by just 1 bronze to always be the cheapest when sorted by price. Then, it would buy up the entire market stock and offer everything for 50 gold each, starting the cycle again. It was glue code between Lua extensions and xdotool, all written in Bash, running WoW under Wine on Linux. The bot was pulling in about 20K gold per day on a single account.
The fun part is, I was 14 years old and had zero programming knowledge at the time—just a feeling that this process could be automated and access to Google. The bot was reading the game state by capturing specific parts of the screen and comparing MD5 checksums of where the buttons were supposed to appear. I used xdotool for mouse and keyboard input, along with in-game settings like Lua command execution inside the game console to target specific NPCs or mailboxes and click to move. It probably pushed me toward pursuing a career in this industry.
This was a good read. As a former WoW addict, I barely stopped myself from undertaking implementing one for myself.
This is not an area I'm familiar with and I always assumed this kind of work would involve concepts that are foreign to me, but upon reading it seems it was not that magical.
As a s'kiddie who used to host gameservers (Q3, IRCd, RTCW) and which is now a dying art, I give many kudos to anyone developing home-brew projects to emulate any sort of game server.
I loved Habbo Hotel as a teen, and the fact there are still folk developing a "retro hotels", self hosted, really sparks a little bit of joy.
I just don't have the fanbase, time nor power of influence to get folk to join but I check around now and then.
A pipe dream of mine is an open source WoW 1.12 client implementation. I wonder if anyone has ever attempted that. Bonus point if it compiles to javascript :)
I am not aware of an open source client, I am not aware of any clients that are not based on the original client for that matter.
Recently the turtle wow (a private server) team announced that they are working on a completely new Unreal Engine 5 client which sounds quit exiting. https://turtle-wow.org/turtle-wow-2
It has been attempted — I know of two efforts. One was in C++ and I don't remember the name or have the link handy, I'm pretty sure it's abandoned.
The other is here: https://github.com/wowserhq/wowser, runs in the browser with WebGL, as you can see, it hasn't seen meaningful progress in almost a decade, but it is already impressive.
I was active in the WoW server emulation scene somewhere around 2008 to 2012 and fondly look back on that time.
Especially the German forum darkwow.de (and later mmonerds.de) is one of the reasons I got into computer science and I'm still in touch with some of the former members.
Ten years later I got an MSc degree in computer science and programming is one of my most profound hobbies.
I was drunk the other night asking genAI to make me an overengineered encrypted messaging system using extensive steganography involving WoW. Got me deep into WoW add-on development.
[+] [-] zelo|1 year ago|reply
The fun part is, I was 14 years old and had zero programming knowledge at the time—just a feeling that this process could be automated and access to Google. The bot was reading the game state by capturing specific parts of the screen and comparing MD5 checksums of where the buttons were supposed to appear. I used xdotool for mouse and keyboard input, along with in-game settings like Lua command execution inside the game console to target specific NPCs or mailboxes and click to move. It probably pushed me toward pursuing a career in this industry.
[+] [-] hakanderyal|1 year ago|reply
This is not an area I'm familiar with and I always assumed this kind of work would involve concepts that are foreign to me, but upon reading it seems it was not that magical.
[+] [-] pjc50|1 year ago|reply
User "marenkay" author of "MaNGOS" saying that they regretted open-sourcing it, although not because of any actions by Activision-Blizzard.
[+] [-] kubb|1 year ago|reply
Looking at the game when others play it makes me think that I would be so happy if I could experience it with a group of friends.
Maybe if I retire and by some miracle know enough people, we can get together and form an awesome guild, and explore the world for the first time?
[+] [-] KeplerBoy|1 year ago|reply
As a young teen it truly felt like magic, but now it just feels like manipulating a database with extra steps.
[+] [-] intelVISA|1 year ago|reply
Once you target >million concurrent every duplicated byte, syscall, matters! Thankfully Blizz doesn't have such concerns/CCU post-Activison..!
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] doublerabbit|1 year ago|reply
I loved Habbo Hotel as a teen, and the fact there are still folk developing a "retro hotels", self hosted, really sparks a little bit of joy.
I just don't have the fanbase, time nor power of influence to get folk to join but I check around now and then.
https://devbest.com/forums/habbo-releases.31/
https://forum.ragezone.com/community/habbo-hotel.282/
[+] [-] fouronnes3|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mnmalst|1 year ago|reply
Recently the turtle wow (a private server) team announced that they are working on a completely new Unreal Engine 5 client which sounds quit exiting. https://turtle-wow.org/turtle-wow-2
[+] [-] norswap|1 year ago|reply
The other is here: https://github.com/wowserhq/wowser, runs in the browser with WebGL, as you can see, it hasn't seen meaningful progress in almost a decade, but it is already impressive.
EDIT: Found the first one, PseuWoW: https://github.com/shlainn/pseuwow
More leads here: https://community.trinitycore.org/topic/12710-we-need-to-cre...
[+] [-] dindresto|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Eumenes|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] h1fra|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] seper8|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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