This is the general documentation on the Robot Testing Environment "BotBox".  See also, the scripting documentation and changelog.
The BotBox was designed primarily because I grew tired of screens of "Connection refused" messages from the battle.net servers when I was trying to test my bot.

Functionality is simple: the botbox will bind to port 6112 on your computer and accept the first incoming connection it receives.
The connection must send a control C (character 0x3) first (else it will become disconnected).  A control D (character 0x4) may be sent at any time to toggle echo state.  Echo state defaults to on.  A control U (0x15) can be sent at any time to clear the most recent message -- "Hello, my^UHi, I'm guest." would come out "Hi, I'm guest." as the Ctrl-U would have deleted the "Hello..." part. This is somewhat untested however. Note: the BotBox accepts one connection only. All other "users" that the incoming connection sees are just pieces of data in the server's memory with no actual connection attached.

Note: you must install the Winsock2 upgrade from Microsoft before the server will run. This applies only to Win95 machines. Win98 and WinNT machines come with Winsock2 pre-installed. If you do not have the Winsock2 upgrade installed, the server will return an error about missing WS2_32.DLL -- I apologize for not having a more descriptive error, but this message box is generated by the Windows loader routines. Winsock2 is a free upgrade available from www.microsoft.com/windows95/downloads/contents/wuadmintools/s_wunetworkingtools/w95sockets2/default.asp?site=95.

To use the server, simply double click the program file. The server window will appear, but all options should be disabled. Options will enable when an incoming connection is accepted -- I saw no reason to allow them to function beforehand as the controls are all related to sending data to the connection.  The dropdown menu, once populated, lists the messages that you can send -- the "Raw" section copies the edit control's content directly onto the network without parsing. You can use this to generate the "pre-connection" text, as well as to generate messages I mangled or didn't provide. However, if you use this to generate users, they will not appear in any of the server's lists. New: Mafukie of BotSource has offered to host trouble reports, etc. on his forum.  I hope to eventually set up a dedicated forum for support of my (seemingly forgotten) bot, as well as the BotBox.  In the meantime, I greatly appreciate Mafukie's offer.

This file is available in all distributions of the BotBox, and online at http://matrixbot.fsgs.com/programs/botbox/readme.html.
The distribution can be downloaded from http://matrixbot.fsgs.com/programs/botbox/botbox.zip.



Kp629