This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/ike_erhascy on 2023-09-11 10:12:23.

I am going to use my random account here to talk about my old project, ike3’ MangosBot, also known as Single Player mode for a popular MMO “World of Warcraft”.

The project was begun in Dec 2009. No idea why I decided to do this, having absolutely no interest in MMOs as a genre, but I remember, I loved Warcraft 3 RTS Games a lot, so probably that was the reason, but the exact one was lost.

World of Warcraft was never popular among my friends, no one told me about it, so I literally had no one to play the game with me. Everyone I knew were playing single player games only.

What I do remember, that I’ve downloaded the WoW TBC Client and learned how to run the Mangos Server, managed to built it from the Source Code. Then I had created undead character and was absolutely immersed in their starting zone (Tirisfal Glades). I had absolutely no idea how to play the game, no knowing about its mechanics, etc.

But later I realized that it is impossible to play the whole game alone. But the strange fact, I never ever thought to go online for some unknown reasons. Instead, I started to search for a possible way to play it as a single player game and found a project named Playerbots, created by a guy with a nickname “BlueBoy”.

It was playable, but very limited and abandoned in the early stage of its development. So, in a long cold winter holiday I decided to fix some things inside and give it a go. And it worked for me and that was the start of the journey.

I’ve created a completely different A.I. engine and had replaced the already existing one in BlueBoy’s code and it blew my mind! The engine was nothing special, just a simple code, a completely inefficient one at first. But the creation and learning process was amazing and I could definitely say that I’ve learned from this project a lot more, than from any other commercial project I did while working for other companies.

I’ve replaced almost all the original BlueBoy’s code in two or three years, and project now has nothing common with the old one, it was completely rewritten.

I actually played the original game in its multiplayer nature for a while then, but it never touched me. The process of playing was not as rewarding as “teaching” the AI to play the game with me. And here is the important thing: to play “with me”, but not “for me”. You could say that I tried to build a mini-game on a top of a game, bringing some kind of tactical and strategic approach when controlling the AI using so-called strategies.

I did the project for myself only and completely ignored the public. That was the fact. I think the reason is that no one of my friends were interested in World of Warcraft, MMO’s, even gaming at all, and even one of my friends did have some interest an played it later on with a great success, He asked that I do not mention his name anywhere.

So, the project was never meant to be popular; it targeted a very niche audience and was slowly developed that way for almost 15 years for now. I had abandoned it several times since, but always came back later. I think the critical point was when the Vanilla WoW started to be popular again, as when I had played it, I realized that this version is really the best among other expansions and the most suitable for my mod, so it literally helped the project to be not lost in its abandoned state.

The current state that it is half-abandoned, but completely playable. You could setup the server, run it on your computer, create a number of level 1 characters and play the whole game with them using the AI, doing the dungeons and even raids quite easily. It is completely possible to do the 1 to max level journey, and the process will be enjoyable.

Although I still add some commits now in then, and even play it in a regular manner while testing, and even enjoy the process, the only way for the project to fully exist and begin to grow, is if the history repeats itself and someone finds it interesting and takes over as I did with the BlueBoy’s code many years ago.

And there is a group that could probably do this, they called themselves as the WoW “Single Player Project”, they have a fork of my repo and provides some ready-to-use downloads, so if you are interested in the mod, it is the best to ask them, not me.

In conclusion, if anyone finds that amusing, leaving some links here a maybe someone do repeat the history again :)