Sometimes when you play your favorite video game, you can find yourself repeating some simple actions. Perhaps this process reminds you of working with old manual machines. You would mount a piece of metal, press the button to launch the drill, pull the lever down, etc. But wait a minute. We live in the 21st century, and people have learned long ago ways to automate simple, monotonous actions. This kind of thoughts occurred to me while I was playing my favorite video game.
After that, I decided to start looking for ways to automate a game process. I have visited plenty of forums and websites. Most of the applications for game automation, which I have found, contained malicious software. Some of them were viruses-free, but they did not work at all. During my searches, people with strange nicknames suggested me to buy these black magic applications that should solve all my problems. But it seems pretty weird to buy something from an anonymous person over the Internet without guarantee. Further, I have realized why bots developers prefer to hide their names. Thus, my searches failed.
My next step was an attempt to implement a bot myself. And I faced a shortage of the systematic documentation about the topic. This situation looks very strange despite the fact that bot applications often solve difficult algorithmic tasks and they based on several information technology domains. This kind of software can be very complex. Moreover, the bots development has a long history. Enthusiasts and professional software developers found a lot of solutions and approaches to effectively solving this task. Why does nobody care about sharing this kind of information?
This book is an attempt to overcome this information vacuum around the topic of bot development. You will find a bots classification here, which I made from my experience and research. We will consider internal mechanisms of different kinds of bots and will try to write simple prototypes. You will learn about tools for the bot development as well as anti-cheating systems for preventing usage of the bots.
The book will be interesting for all players, who want to discover new sense and approach to the game process. It will also be useful for players, who do not care about bot applications internals but just want to buy one and use it. You will learn about available kinds of bots and which exploiting issues you can face. I hope everybody will find something interesting and new in this book.