GHost++

GHost++ is a Warcraft III game hosting bot. As the original project on Google Code is no longer available, https://github.com/uakfdotb/ghostpp contains the most "official" version of GHost++.

Github: https://github.com/uakfdotb/ghostpp
Website: https://www.ghostpp.com/

GHost++ is no longer actively maintained. Nevertheless, GHost++ remains widely used for hosting Warcraft III games, and there are no major known bugs.

Here are alternatives that are actively being developed as of 01 December 2018:

Aura: simple bot to host games from a server, with greatly modernized core but with many features (MySQL support, autohosting) stripped out
maxemann96/ghostpp: a few additional features like votestart, commands from terminal

1.30.2 Note

Since 1.30.2 Patch this software is no longer needed for the average user.

1.30 Note

For 1.30, put Warcraft III.exe in the bot_war3path. (You should name it Warcraft III.exe to avoid Battle.net connection issues, but you may also name it warcraft.exe.)

For automatic extraction of common.j and blizzard.j Also put the entire Data Subdirectory and the file .build.info in bot_war3path. (Actually, it is recommended that you extract common.j and blizzard.j yourself and put them in bot_mapcfgpath, since the new CASC file is very large.)

War3Patch.mpq, War3x.mpq, war3.exe, game.dll, and storm.dll are no longer needed.

Bot hanging on authenticating? The bncsutil in this repository has recently been updated, and fixes a bug in the authentication step that occasionally causes hanging. So try recompiling bncsutil.

1.29 Note

For 1.29, put Warcraft III.exe in the bot_war3path. You may name it Warcraft III.exe or warcraft.exe.

war3.exe, game.dll, and storm.dll are no longer needed.

Also, use War3x.mpq instead of War3Patch.mpq. (Actually, it is recommended that you extract common.j and blizzard.j yourself and put them in bot_mapcfgpath, since the new MPQ file is very large. Make sure to also exclude War3x.mpq from bot_war3path so that the host bot does not attempt to read the archive.)

Compilation

GHost++ depends on cmake, libboost, libgmp, zlib, libbz2, and libmysqlclient. These steps should suffice to compile GHost++ on Ubuntu 16.04:

sudo apt-get install -y cmake git libboost-all-dev build-essential libgmp-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libmysql++-dev
git clone https://github.com/maxemann96/ghostpp
cd ghostpp

cd bncsutil
mkdir build
cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -B./build -H./
cd build && make && sudo make install

cd ../../StormLib/
mkdir build
cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -B./build -H./
cd build && make && sudo make install

cd ../../CascLib/
mkdir build
cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -B./build -H./
cd build && make && sudo make install

cd ../../ghost/
make

See MANUAL or the ghostpp.com wiki for more in-depth but possibly outdated guides on other platforms.

Configuration

Generally, it is recommended to copy default.cfg to ghost.cfg, and update options there. GHost++ will read default.cfg first, and then overwrite the configuration with any options that appear in ghost.cfg.

Once configured, start GHost++:

./ghost++

You can pass a command-line argument to use a different secondary configuration filename, instead of ghost.cfg:

./ghost++ /opt/myconfig.cfg

Usage

See MANUAL or the ghostpp.com wiki for instructions on using GHost++.

maxemann96 / ghostpp