How to run bots on servers

[TonberryJam]

I thought it would be interesting to do as a project.

so some questions:
What are rules regarding bots on servers?
How do you get a bot to run on the server?

[tasonir]

Bots are written into your RC file, there are a number of functions that crawl will call for you when it's ready for your input, and then you can write a script to determine what to do, and send input keys directly to the game. There is some command to mark an account as a bot account in sequell, this prevents it from showing up in various statistics which are intended to show only human players, so it's nice to do that. You'd have to look up what that is, I don't know offhand. As for running them online just have some reasonable delay between actions (say an action every 2-3 seconds) and you should be fine.

See qw's github for more info: https://github.com/elliptic/qw

[advil]

Everything tasonir says sounds right, but I think ideally you should also directly contact the server operator that you're running on just to make sure they're ok with it, see whether they have any requests or rules for their specific server, and to make sure that they know who you are in case there's a problem. A misconfigured bot could potentially eat a lot of cpu, and right now people are a but touchy about DOS issues (someone's been effectively DOSing several crawl servers by overloading them with http requests through tor). I think most server operators are fine with bots and there are probably bots running where people didn't contact the server operator, but I still think contacting them directly would be the best thing to do.

Do also look carefully at how qw throttles when running online and try to emulate that.

[TonberryJam]

ok thanks.

[johnstein]

Do also look carefully at how qw throttles when running online and try to emulate that.

THIS! bots are cool, but they hammer the server. When I notice a bot that is running particularly hot (5x more resources consumed compared to regular games) I typically ask them to throttle it some more. (especially during tournaments)

Ever since CSZO shut down, CBRO load has significantly increased and I haven't been able to prioritize moving to a location with MOAR POWER (since I'm maxed out right now), so every spare CPU cycle and MB of RAM is fairly precious. That shouldn't stop bot runners, but PLEASE try to keep server performance in mind and be open to tweaking bot performance if asked.

as advil said, qw and gw should have good examples of throttling.

Thanks!