I havnt done this in a couple of weeks, thats on me.
So here we go. Released Chimera Alpha 14 this last week. Finally I think its stable the last of the nav issues seems to be resolved. The last of the crash issues on start up are also resolved. Getting nothing but good things now.. and people are starting to ask for new features.. always a good sign.. instead of asking to fix xyz, lol. Got out a few updates to EQ2 as there were some big bugs that have crept up with the Origins(tm) servers.. (servers that use the old code from way back in the eq2 early days). So a lot of things just were not working anymore as the bot was tuned to the current version. But did get some needed features added like computer vision for looting, and many performance tweaks. Might as well since I was in the code, why not give it a good dusting.
Also updated the HexPlorer plugin to add some well needed features.. mainly a disassembly view, and overhauling the search bar to be able to do advanced searches (GameBase+0x100, or User32.GetCurPos) etc instead of just a 0x00 address. Speed up the search tab and overhauled the search a little so that while it was already fast.. its even faster now.. I mean hey when it comes to optimizing for speed.. there are always room for improvements.. every ms/tick counts when you are dealing with gigs of ram you need to search!
Oh, and just added Dx11 support yesterday.. I was using dx9.. in the hopes that the bot could be run inside of a VM, but now that the bot can access a VM from outside of the VM.. there is no need to try to maintain that older dx, so.. upgraded to Dx11... with a fallback to gdi.. So, you could still technically run it in a vm if you really wanted too. The only real bottleneck there is that GDI has limits on how many frames it can read.. since its all cpu based. All of the dx code handles things on the gpu side so its extremely fast.
Going forward.. this week.. For Beta 1.. I want to finish the Monitor tab. Get monitors working and the API for it as well. This is really that last major component missing to start getting up some tutorial videos and showing how to get the bot working with other games. Most of the core code is already implemented.. mainly tweaking and adding in various scanners.. ie linescanner, ocr scanner, etc.
Next week and beyond.. The bot uses yolov5. Which is blazingly fast. But with yolov8 out now for a while. I need to revisit this to see if its faster or just has more features. All I really care about atm is speed.. while the features it offers are nice (poses, enhanced segmentation, etc) the bot currently does not take advantage of these.. so I need to see if this is just overhead that will slow down yolov8 and if yolov5 is still much faster. I did some tests with this months ago.. and v8 was by far slower than v5. but many months of updates have taken place.. I should give it another look.
For everything else.. I am still updating the older Viper bots and adding in api's, bug fixes, and feature requests.. if you have them please post them in bot-requests.
I will have a lotro patch out later today to address a few things that have come up this last week that need resolving.
Thats it for now, catch ya next week!
TLDR; Good things still coming stay tuned!