Bot Of The Month Club

Courtesy of Hamfon & The Hambots

Xelagot is a configurable and scriptable bot written by XelaG. It provides many capabilities. This month, we will discuss what XelaG has done with xelagot to allow it to provide music over a larger area than can be covered by typical DJBots. The following paragraphs are written by XelaG :-)

My xelagot bot, written in Delphi 4 (object Pascal), was born seventeen months ago and is inspired on HamFon's hambot. It has 3 companion bots, which are scriptable and can have different abilities. Some of these abilities are hard-coded in the bot, others flourish only through scripting. Its basic abilities are: warp across universes and worlds, follow the owner (it can track which AW browser you use if properly trained) or other avatars, move random (bird bot) or elliptical (blimp), interact with people and bots though the AW chat and whisper interface using different languages and command sets (English, Spanish and Dutch are available) and though a built-in server/client interface independent of the AW browser, detect avatars and clicks on objects and avatars, seed, survey and build, play midis, modify world attributes, push URLs, eject, send e-mails and attachments through its built-in SMTP client, load and execute scripts.

Scripts can organise all these abilities, and turn the bots into guides and boothbots, story-tellers and actors, paintball bots, world-management bots, tools for building projects, etc. They can also be scripted to communicate with other xelagots through the internet (Win 98, 2000 or NT4), for instance, to coordinate certain actions, and to send emails. Examples of scripted xelagots can be seen at various places, among others: world Ethereal, caretaker Who, bot Silver (keyword "Silver help"); world Solas, caretakers XTC and NXS, bot Laura (keyword "Laura help"). Paintball scripts are run in Getaway, svillage, utopia, war, war2 and other worlds regularly. The AW Paintball network, run by Brant, uses them at AWTeen 450N 100e. Check the railway going east on Mars 59N 503W 0.5a 270: all the double-sided warps were calculated and built by a Xelagot using a script.

One of the hard-coded abilities of the bot is playing midis. Until recently, xelagots could only use one speaker object to play midis. The newer versions accept multiple speakers, which the user can define beforehand. This allows the music to cover a much larger area, each speaker's action radius being limited to about 60 meters (or what you chose in the AW browser). I've tested putting 3 speakers in a row at 100 meters interval, and this works beautifully, covering an area roughly 100 meters wide by 300 meters long. This was a challenge to make: it required developing a totally new Pascal class, changing the graphic user interface radically, and re-defining the verbal commands.

A companion program, dj.exe, provides the midi lists for xelagot. It checks the validity of the URLs from a normal text file of midis, downloads the midis, tests them and adjusts the timing for the bot - you can even play them to see if you like them or not. Finally, it saves these lists in a format the bot can use. And, if you like, you can customise and save a Hambot diskjockey file! This program was very exciting to make: it was my first attempt at using threads, mci and wininet/winsock features. I am grateful to Faber for his help on these matters, and to Canopus, Ima Genius and other bot-makers and citizens for their support and advice.

For more information about Xelagots, you can Email XelaG (no telegrams, please), or check out the Xelagot home page or the Midis help page.

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