After #kyoto was visited by a user named Koroku and was more or less treated pretty poorly when he inquired about Kaiou and what he was doing wrong in an addition to the scripting, I realized I probably should have made mention somewhere on the site about the current state of Kaiou and how to get help. So let me try to fix that now.
Some of you reading this know the history of Kaiou but for those who don’t allow me to just give a very quick overview of it. Back at the end of 1998 I wanted to write my own RPG Battle Bot. In 1999 Kaiou was born and was used to host #DBZRPG. For many years the RPG flourished and updates were frequent. Eventually my views of keeping Kaiou closed source and personal changed and the public could download it. Meanwhile, #DBZRPG was coming to an end, having more or less done everything under the sun in the 300~400 gaming sessions (or “quests” as we called them) throughout the years.
Eventually the channel died and most of the users disappeared. A few of them remained and migrated to #Kyoto, which later was joined by people who had never even heard of or seen Kaiou. Updates to Kaiou went from being nearly every week or two to once every few years.
Why am I bringing all this up? Well if you’re one of the curious people who download Kaiou and need help with it, randomly going into #kyoto and asking for help is going to get you one or two responses. Either you’ll get the deer-in-headlights look from the people who don’t know what Kaiou is or you’re going to get the people who vaguely remember it and believe that the bot is completely dead. MAYBE you’ll get lucky and someone there will know that Kaiou isn’t completely dead (though rarely updated) but still won’t be able to help you with anything more than turning it on.
I can count the number of people who have real experience with the code of Kaiou on one hand. There’s myself, of course, and a few people who used to reside on Esper.net: Tobias, Rayth and Sigma. The latter three are almost never on IRC any more. And even if they were, the person who has the most experience with the coding is still myself, having worked on this bot for years and years.
So where do you go for help? Well, there’s a few options for you. The first and possibly best option is to go to my message board and make a post in the Kaiou Discussion Thread. If you post there I will definitely see it, as I check that board daily (usually). The other, slower option, is good ol fashioned email. iyouboushi @ gmail . com just put “KAIOU” in the subject line so I know it’s about the bot and not spam.
And that’s just about all I can really say about it. To Koroku, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry for what happened in #kyoto and I’m sorry I never posted this information before, so that you’d have an idea on where to go for help. For what it’s worth, I really liked the idea of boosts increasing the user’s HP and have already added it into the bot, ready for the next version. And for what you’re missing to make it work, from what I gathered from the logs I saw of #kyoto, you’re missing the line that temporarily sets the user’s HP and increases the HP by the boost’s value and then writing the new HP value back to the character file. Add that it and it should work.
For everyone else, hope this helps.
Dear Iyou. I’d like to steal Kaiou. How do I do that? I couldn’t find help on this topic anywhere.
Signed, most burningly,
NOT KuroMa.