[bad_captain]

The problems with bots is that 1) many servers do not use bots, so they are not a critical server component, and 2) there's really only 1 dev who focuses on bot development, and he's away most of the time.

I have tried to put together some fixes for a few issues I've seen with bots, including the one you mentioned about the mana regen one with help from Caryatis. Besides having less than an hour every other night to work on it, I have had my server die on me last month due to faulty hardware and with the holidays, have just now got my EqEmu server running again, but on the same PC that I run EQ. The zone crash issues I was having are fixed now, so I believe I will be able to resubmit the fixes soon with a little more testing.

If you want to contribute to the development of bots, feel free! We can use the help. Just be aware that some things may not make sense when first looking at them, and that there are many things within the bot code that depend on and interact with other parts of the code outside of bots. Also, since bots are often an afterthought, any bot code that impacts other aspects of the code will be heavily scrutinized. Without someone who specifically champions the bot code, it most be shown to be bug free and be a significant improvement to get included in the base code.

If you see something that looks odd to you, spend more time researching. If you still think it looks odd, bring it up here, or test it yourself. The mana regen issue you mentioned is the result of an even bigger issue with bot mana regen that took me a couple of days to determine the scope of.. Bot mana regen is calculated on the wrong timer and is way higher than it should be. But to fix that, there are many other things that need to be fixed (such as I have in my bot fixes that I will be posting again soon).. This also helped me figure out that players were gaining too much mana regen when standing. I posted that I thought it was incorrect, posted a few examples that showed that the calculation was incorrect, and it was included in the code. Just be prepared to show / explain yourself if you find an issue rather than just say you think it looks wrong.