Ahh, the main user interface of Furbot.

Don't make fun of my icons.

There's been a lot of work under the hood to make this easier to use, at least near as I can make it, time will only tell if my work is worth it or not. I've dispensed with a few things, and added some things, reworked how some functionality of the bot is used, and depreciated some of them. For example, it was a large amount of coding involved with making the movement appear and disappear, so rather than waste code space on that, it's always on now. The various elements which used to exist at the bottom of the bot are gone, the Received Text window now is a flexible text box instead. And there's also a scroll back buffer so that you can easily look back several pages of text without the text jumping about whenever something new comes in.

Configuring the bot is simple now, it auto loads the path to the client now based on what the registry tells it, and auto locates the folders used by Furcadia based on a default install. There is some means to tweak this auto setup and will be detailed later as we go over the various things you can adjust in the program.

Before we depart into more about the bot below, do note the time, and two numbers you see present next to it. They represent packets received and packets processed. If ever during normal operation of the bot, they do not match, or are at least one off from each other, your bot is lagging from over coding. If they get too far out of sync, your bot will soon crash or become unsynchronized with the server.

As of right now, Furbot should run on just about any Windows machine, the only possible problem might be that your machine is lacking the one of the three external libraries which are required, but if you've installed a previous version of the bot, or Internet Explorer 5+, then the only other thing which is needed is the library needed to run database's. Otherwise, to improve the functionality of the bot, I got rid of the need to have the winsock ocx on the machine by directly calling on the API functions in windows to speed things up and improve performance. Connecting the bot is a simple matter now, you really should not have to do anything to the default configuration to make it work, it gains all it's required connection information from your furcadia settings file.

The configuration dialog found under the File menu contains some information about the paths it uses, and a few items to tweak the bot to work around some possible quirks with your machine.

Close client program on disconnection does just what it says, if the server goes away, client is closed.

Enable multiple client support is there in case your windows machine does not handle listening sockets properly and leaves them allocated once they've been used.

Use IP Addressing because some windows configurations don't handle the localhost launch correctly. 

Automatically save the botscript attempts to save the script when the program closes without prompting you about saving.

Use long paths because in some cases the client won't launch right without a path to the ini file.

Load last bot is handy to quickly get back into the saddle after operations where you can't have the bot running, (like restarting the computer).

There is two check boxes which govern how the program connects to the server, one selects either DNS based addressing, which relies on the name of the server being properly mapped to the IP address of the server, and when checked, tells the program to use the physical address instead as compiled into the bot. The second check box selects whether the program connects to the same port that your normal client would use, or a different one just in case you either seem to be running into some problems use the same port as the client normally does, or just to be different.

Then there is a list which informs you of where the bot is getting various bits of information from, like the location of the last bot, the path to Furcadia, where the bot thinks the alt files are, and where it's saving it's configuration (this) and where it expects to find Furcadia's settings. There is now a means to override the default location with the program looking in the preferred locations for the settings file, see my blog entry "Interesting Bug Fix" for details.