BotLab Devlog

After the improvements on bot discovery and operation as reported in June, work continued on the bot development side in the last two weeks.

@TOBIAS95 had some questions, and while answering these I used the opportunity to write in more detail how the process of bot development works.
Some of the topics covered:

  • How do we describe what a bot should do, in a way that avoids misunderstandings between people?
  • How can I take and save the screenshots used to describe a bot?
  • How can I share the files I collected with other people?

I posted this guide here:

This week, I explored the bot implementation process further, based on the example screenshot given last week. This exploration answered several questions about developing bots:

  • How can we easily model example files to use in automated tests, for example when testing image file decoding implementations? The elm app implemented here displays a Base64 encoding of the file chosen by the user. The elm module containing the automated tests demonstrates how such a Base64 representation of a file is converted back to the original Bytes sequence representing the file.
  • How do we decode an image which was stored into a BMP file using Paint.NET? The automated tests added here model files and expected elm values resulting after decoding these image files.
  • How do we locate user interface elements in screenshots? The pattern model implemented here supports flexible configuration of a search which works with screenshots from video games like EVE Online.
  • How can we make it easy for developers to find the right search configuration for their use-cases? The graphical user interface implemented here supports quick configuration and testing of image search patterns.

I posted the complete exploration here: