Bot Of The Month Club

The making of --- Preston...

Preston began about one and a half years ago as a very simple to use keeperbot. Its purpose was to provide a simple dictionary for simple phrase responses, and a midi feature.

And thats what I did, and thats what I released. Preston Build 2, the first public version had actually only one major advantage: it was easy to use.

Which is what people did, and it did not take long for feature requests to arrive. Having "Keeper Bot" in mind, the bot developed ejection control, world control, and stuff like that. As people noticed, its window kept growing and growing.

In the Preston curriculum vitae, there are 3 major development stages... first when it outgrew its "phrase" event system, and it learned how to recognize object clicks, avatar clicks, midi clicks, etc.

The second major step was its object change facility. By using the name tags already known from the AW browser, it was now possible to have Preston move an object around for you or create a new object just from a single dictionary entry. In order for this to work, Preston needed an object cache similar to the one the AW Browser keeps, managing things like sectors, cells, live update, etc. In order to debug these data structures, I made a visual display of the cache contents, which made its way on the Preston interface too.

But the biggest step for Preston, a step I never planned originally, was to have more than one action per event. Preston turned into a graphical script editor, visualizing an event driven program flow using its dictionary list. The last thing added to this category was the "wait" action, enabling Preston to execute more than one sequenced flow of commands simultaneously. Its like putting cooperative multitasking into the bot.

The dictionary system in Preston even starts to outgrow some other parts of the bot, causing some redundancies, e.g. the World Schedule table now can be completely "emulated" using VRT triggered world settings change commands.

The name Preston, btw, has been taken from a Novel of Isaac Asimov, who is pretty famous for his Robot Stories.

Faber can be contacted in AW, or by email . You can get more information about Fabers Preston bot and his other bots from imabot .

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