What is it these supposed bots are doing that is having some effect on the BGS?
Because as far as I know, you either have to shoot another ship, complete a mission, deliver cartographic data, or otherwise perform some service for a faction to have any effect on the BGS. Pretty sure any Combat-Bot is not only going to have little luck even against NPC's. Missions - I just don't see anyone scripting something to run back and forth between stations and accomplishing anything after even a short time, as the galaxy is in continual motion.
So shine a light here - what exactly are they doing?
Okay that's a fair question.
And we're immediately into that thing I'm doing which is asking:
What is the botter doing? and How are they doing it?
So in my particular instance - I am trying to run a macro that gets screengrabs of the traffic every half hour.
The main problem is that I don't know how far down in the menu the Traffic Report will be.
And I can't be sure how many "pages" the traffic report will run to.
And both these things change periodically.
So my macro currently has variables for [TrafficMenuItemPos] and [TrafficNumPages] and they are timestamped so if they're too old, the macro will prompt for new values.
But what I think I should be able to do is to use an Optical Character Recognition program to look at the last screen grab in the screenies folder, and if it doesn't have the "End of Traffic Report" marker, then to call another macro that opens each menu item in turn (and scroll down) until it DOES find an "End of traffic" report marker, and then set the [TrafficMenuItemPos] variable accordingly.
So then I will be able to select the one particular menu item that I am looking for.
It's a kludge, but it should work.
Reading a menu?
Yeah - it's going to take me a couple of weekends to get it working reliably.
But, I'll have lots of time over the Christmas break, so I expect I'll have a base capability in the new year.
JTrinity says that she thinks that mission selection is done by hand because it's hard and requires decision making, and then the automation only kicks in to fly the routes.
I don't see it that way.
For me - the very first thing that I have to solve is menu reading.
My coding skills are garbage, but already I can see the logic flow that I would use to make decisions,
and what parts of the screen grab that I would have to interrogate to make the selection.
The autopilot - that's the thing that looks intimidating to me. And there are proof of concept demonstrations of that already.
Which - as I keep saying - listen to the Lave Radio podcast episode 216 from about the 58 minute mark, and Braandlin has linked to the Proof-of-concept autopilot video above so thanks mate.
Are these bots combat capable?
Well, again I ask myself how would I do it?
If I had autopilot working, then I assume I can orient to a selected target, and can navigate to the CZ.
I would operate in winged pairs.
The target I would select would be the wingmate, and I would fire a healing laser at that target.
The rest of the weaponry would be turreted pulse lasers set to Fire At Will.
Cash in every 20 minutes.
In fact - thanks for getting me riled up and answering your question.
I was wondering where the bot fleet was redeployed since Sunday.
They weren't redeployed anywhere - they're still in Gateway, they're just not leaving the system, so they're not showing up as traffic.
How do I know?
- I don't.
- I'm guessing.
- It's circumstantial.
But I'm glad I left my monitor guy there.
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