Official Community BETA of the EQEmu Server Bots Begins Today!

Official Community BETA of the EQEmu Server Bots Begins Today!

I am pleased to announce that the community beta of the EQEmu Server Bots is ready for QA testing and begins today. This means that this code base that is going to replace what has been refereed to as “EQOffline” in about 7 days and before this happens, this beta period is the communities opportunity to try out this code and post issues that need to be addressed. Even if you do not use bots at all, you will want to download this code and try it as a lot of code was re-factored that could possibly impact that standard code, though I know of no issues right now nor do I expect any.

If you would like to try this code, simple download the source code from the EQEmuServerBOTS branch, located here:

http://code.google.com/p/projecteqemu/source/browse/#svn/branches/EQEmuServerBOTS

After you have have it, you can either select the normal debug/release configuration to compile or you can select the BOTS configuration as either debug or release, though I recommend you use debug in case you are a code stud and happen across an issue and you can actually send me a stack or something.

Before you run the bots code you will need to change all your “EQOffline” rule values to “Bots” by simply renaming them in the rule_values table. Next, you will need to source the “bots.sql” file that can be found in the /utils/sql/svn sub-directory. Please note that bots are no longer stored in the npc_types table so you will need to backup all of your EQOffline bots BEFORE you source this file. If you choose not to backup your bots (bad idea), then you can expect this script to drop your existing botsinventory table, leaving your bots naked.

While I do not provide any type of data transformation script to migrate EQOffline bots to the new bots system, I am confident that there is someone in the community who has the time to do this task (I don't, at the moment).

After you have your database ready, go ahead and execute your server and enjoy the bots and please report any bugs to “Development::Bugs” and specifically mention in your bug reports that this is a bug in EQEmu Server Bots branch.