New project: Port D2BS core to Microsoft Chakra JS Engine?

[cyphercider]

Hi All,

Per the thread here: https://github.com/kolton/d2bot-with-kolbot/issues/188, I have had great difficulty trying to build the latest version of D2BS with Spidermonkey v1.8. Spidermonkey v1.8 is super aged at this point, and the newest version of Spidermonkey has many breaking changes that make it incompatible with the latest version of D2BS core in the Assembla repository.

The JSAPI documentation for Spidermonkey at Mozilla seems out-of-date and not very actively maintained. I've considered both Chakra and V8 as alternatives. Because D2BS is very dependent on MS visual studio and Windows API's, and because I've been very impressed by the open source ethos at Microsoft since Satya Nadella took over, and with the progress made by the Chakra JS team at Microsoft (see YouTube video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD5YW-jM2KQ), I would like to take on a project to port D2BS over to the Chakra engine.

Do any of you following this repo have the experience / interest to collaborate on this project? Ideally I would like to find a way to keep the community using a new and improved D2BS core focused on:

1. NOT commercially exploiting the bot. I.e. how can we make it hard for spammers to exploit it.
2. Technical innovation and fun. Let's have fun with it. "Super cool" ideas might include trying to incorporate some machine learning algorithm to maximize loot yield, for example.
3. NOT focused on taking advantage of Battle.net or having a contentious relationship with Blizzard. We can consider using a private server like SlashDiablo (https://www.reddit.com/r/slashdiablo/) so as not to use Blizzard's servers in a way that they are actively trying to prevent. The goal here is the joy of botting and the love of D2.

Me personally... I am a professional software developer. Would like to work with some folks on this project who want to sharpen our skills technically as well as have some fun botting. If you're interested in collaborating in a new / fun side project, I would love to discuss with you. Thanks!

[poirierdev]

Personally, I think this is a cool idea. That being said I think a lot of people stopped reading at when you said:

NOT focused on taking advantage of Battle.net or having a contentious relationship with Blizzard. We can consider using a private server like SlashDiablo (https://www.reddit.com/r/slashdiablo/) so as not to use Blizzard's servers in a way that they are actively trying to prevent. The goal here is the joy of botting and the love of D2.

I say this because all in all, the skilled developers on these things do it for the money (there is decent coin to be made in the sales of D2 items, enough to assume Blizzard is in on it, but that's a whole other story)

I've messed around with customizing Kolbot to my needs and dug into the core a bit just for the funzies, and would be interested in some collaboration. Unfortunately I haven't even looked at SlashDiablo but from my understanding (which may or may not be flawed), they focus quite heavily on getting rid of botters as well, to preserve the game's integrity for everyone else playing there.

Feel free to hit me up for further discussion though, I'm always up for brainstorming and helping out where I can.

Cheers, GP

[cyphercider]

Hey @LeMule , thanks for the feedback, that makes sense. After all, skilled devs can't just spend all of their time doing free things. That said, for me, it's really more about avoiding doing something of dubious legality than anything else. If there were a publicly hosted github repo for this project, I guess people could take it and do what they want, but the official position of the project would be to play by the rules of the people who own the servers.

After I opened this issue, I read more and saw that SlashDiablo doesn't allow bots, so of course that's out as well. That said, I see that there's an open source D2 server available, maybe it's the one SlashDiablo actually runs on: https://github.com/tesseract2048/d2gs, that contributors to this project could host and use for testing / recreation.

Have you done a successful build of D2BS any time recently? I've realized while trying to refactor the latest code (which I believe is reflected here: https://github.com/noah-/d2bs, as well as on the "bob-18" branch on the assembla SVN repository), that this project would be way more practical to start with a working build and switch over gradually, rather than trying to get the whole thing off of Spidermonkey 1.8 in one fell swoop. That said, I just can't get the VS2010 project to build on my VS2015 platform. I was hoping maybe you had more luck. It would also work to have a version of Spidermonkey 1.8 js_static.lib compiled with the MSVS v140 (2015) compiler, because then I could link that static library to the rest of the project building on the new compiler. I tried to build Spidermonkey 1.8-rc1 using the latest version of the mozilla build tools, though, and it seems their current build tools don't work with code that old.

[cyphercider]

Closing this issue for now. May open later if someone else has an interest.

[noah-]

I'd be interested to see d2bs with chakra

[fuhd3r]

id be very interested in d2bs being built on a newer framework. especially with the new move to d2r and the mass movement of players there.

while it would still be against blizzards tos, d2lod will likely fall into a decline on the developer side, like d1 did. they may be a lot more lax on things, but i also fully support your not wanting any influence from them.