Over time I have ran quite a few IRC bots, IRC being Internet Relay Chat for people without the know. An IRC bot, is a bit of script or program that does automated tasks on a chat channel. Now, KHBOT was a creation of mine which stood the torrents of time, that is until I lost my most recent changes to hard drive corruption, after that I gave up on the project, and let a bot called RuneScript or rscript take over the niche that my bot had filled.
On IRC channels, with the invention of chanserv, there is little place for an IRC bot to manage access or ops, so it’s left to automate the more complex tasks, such as maintaining topics, hosting games or trivia. I play an RPG called RuneScape, with the goal of levelling up to become better at different skills, I created a mIRC script that would allow the lookup of your ‘score’ in the high score list and return the results in channel. Now as time progressed I began to use this score to produce predictions on what you needed to do to level.
After putting up with rscript for a while, and it’s assorted features I decided it was about time I did something about making a better improved bot with my data. Darwin is the name of the new project, another IRC Runescape statistics bot, but this time it is together with a community I’m part of, called RuneSource, the site and the bot share the same database, a database of exp that we ourselves have gathered and can confirm it’s accuracy, unlike a lot of other sites which tend to share errors.
Darwin is a shared project between me and Filoni, who produces the calcs for RuneSource and also does his own set of statistics logging. Darwin is currently is a sort of eggdrop (TCL) and PHP hybrid, although I will be porting the scripts to mIRC later. The idea is; because most of the processing can be done on php, there only needs one centralised database, where bots can simply act as a relay to pass information. This means a wide span of mIRC and eggdrop bots can all run from one centralised place, so people can run their own bot but have the latest updates without having to do anything.
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