Greetings

[Rashka]

Hello there,
I come seeking information. Before I get into details, allow me to give everyone a bit of history about myself.

Ive been into gaming for about 17 years, since I was about 6 you could say. (Im 23 now). Anyway, Ive been trying to create a MUD for use in IRC (IRC being the client that I am most familiar with for text based games and nearly everyone I know uses IRC.). I am mainly in need of an IRC bot to take care of the character login, as well as managing stats and XP. I have tried searching Google for such bots, but I havent had any luck. I am interested in learning to program such a bot, and have some SLIGHT experience with .cs files. (I used to program items for a Ultima Online shard.) That is about the only experience I have with programming, besides HTML. If anyone knows of anyway I can learn to program the bot that I need, I would be greatly appreciative if I could be provided with this information.

Please note, I am NOT looking for someone to "do the work for me" as I am very willing to program it myself. (Experience has taught me that if you want something programmed right, program it yourself.) I apologise if I may have come across as rude in the footnote, as that was not my intention. My only intention is to gather information and to establish the point that I will be doing the programming.

Thank you for reading and/or responding to this post.

[unknown]

I think the best way would be to learn some programming language like ruby or perl (basically somthing that has decent networking libraries and you dont have to compile it to run it).

You would definitly be able to some a really simple IRC bot (so all the IRC message parsing and so on is done) and modify it to do what you want.

Its quite possible but the route would probably be to write somthing like a really simple text based game (I mean non IRC based) as practice, so you can learn the basic concepts in a quicker way (than connecting/reconnecting a bot over and over).

I guess this is all pretty vauge, but heres an example of what a really basic IRC bot might look like (in ruby): http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/1785

from there you could add things like, split the input into words.. check if theres any words that fit the context and if so call a function which would change somthing in the bots state, optionally sending new messages to IRC.

[Rashka]

Ive never heard of ruby, is there a website where I might learn more of the language?

[Skorche]

http://www.ruby-lang.org

[Rashka]

Thanks for the link Skorche.

[mac_girl]

I haven't chatted on IRC in a really long time but don't most IRC bots still use Tcl? Tcl is really easy to learn

eg.
set greet "Hi!"

puts $greet

I remember way back then I used a bnc to fake my ip# and it was written in tcl I believe and so were most of the channel bots to hold the rooms and op people but I out grew IRC long ago so I don't know.

http://www.tcl.tk