[Ottawa-pm] Lacuna Expanse: A massively multiplayer online strategy game built with perl

[Yanick Champoux]

On 11/09/2010 04:00 PM, Dave O'Neill wrote:
> strategy game (Tribal Wars) a few years ago. The constraints were a bit
> different -- the game allowed add-on tools, browser extensions, etc, but
> did not provide API access and forbade unattended bots.
[..]
 > Of course, once I ran out of features to add, I quickly got bored with
 > the game and stopped playing. :)


	Typical of the hacker mindset. The problem, whatever it might be, is 
usually just a good excuse to tinker up a cool solution. :-)

	It's like, one of my back-burner project is to write a web browser/SMIL 
engine for the space battle game "Full Thrust".  It's not really because 
I want to play the game. It's really writing the engine that sounds fun. :-)

> The solution was to write a pluggable proxy to intercept traffic to and
> from the game server with HTTP::Proxy. The plugins scraped specific
> pages for useful game state and inserted into a local database of all
> game activity. Then, some additional pages (force-served in the game
> domain via the proxy) used the known state to plan future actions, and
> provide simple links for kicking them off (ie: optimized raids on nearby
> villages based on available units and the target's expected
> replenishment time, building more units once resources were available,
> etc).

	Aaaah, that slightly reminds me of the tools for the BBS game TradeWar.

> I've still got the proxy code somewhere if one of you Lacuna players
> might find it useful.

	If it's somewhere accessible, just throw in the link.  We never can 
have too many code snippets. :-)


Joy,
`/anick