Joined: 31 Aug 2005 Posts: 5 Location: Lancashire, UK
Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2005 7:23 pm Post subject: Horde Modules
OK, Mojave may remember me rambling on about this, but I don't believe i told anyone else.
Imagine a world where bots hooked up to one another and talked, networked, passed on information. You do that an instantly - BAM! - Growl, Botlist, etc. are all made dynamic.
This is Horde's job. by linking together different bots, you can create a network like no other.
It consists of two bots, the System bot and the Conversation Holder bot. The Conversation Holder invites the System Bot into a conversation. The System bot notes that this is the main conversation and sets a global variable to that socket. The System bot constantly messages the conversation to keep it alive. When the first bot joins, the holder bot leaves and the system carries on pinging. More bots join, and then leave. When they have all left, the System calls the Holder and the new conversation is logged into the global variable.
Horde's messages are actually pretty easy to understand. There are protocols to interpret the Data and send things off, and the modules are the things that actually send them. The Message looks like this:
Quote:
[Bot Node Name|Protocol Name] Data
The important thing here is the node name. This is the single-word name the bot uses to converse with others. For example, White Warrior might use 'WW', Darwin would use Darwin, Bot-X would use BotX. This is used to identify the bot that sent the message.
Sounds kind of inefficient to handle your message exchanges over common IM. Maybe if you make your own TCP protocol, the different bots would check in with static host server(s), and those servers would broadcast information. Or another twist, the hosts would tell each client where to find the other clients, and then each client acts as a server too and every client is connected with every other client. Messages could be exchanged much more quickly then. _________________ Current Site (2008) http://www.cuvou.com/