OpenKore

The history of OpenKore

About me

This story is written by me, VCL. I'm the OpenKore project leader, and I'm one of the people who started OpenKore back in late 2003. I'm also one of the few people who haven't left the Ragnarok Online botting community. The first time I started playing Ragnarok Online was in May or July 2002, when iRO (the international server) was still in a period call "beta 2", and was free.

The history of botting

I first played manually, but it soon became boring and tedious. That's how I started looking at bots. I can't say a lot about the history of bots before I was introduced to them, so I'll just tell you what I know.

In mid 2003, there were many bots. I won't bore you with the details, but here are the most widely known:

Name	Quality	What happened to it?
Revemu	Good	Dead
Kore	Good	Dead
ApezBot	Sucks, a lot	Dead

Yeah, you've read it right. They're all dead by now! With "dead", I mean:

• They're not being developed anymore by the authors.
• They don't work anymore on today's RO servers.

They died because their authors have lost interest in RO. </div>

That's great, but what about OpenKore?

You must have noticed Kore in the above table. The name looks so much like OpenKore! Surely it has got something to do with OpenKore... right?

Yes, that's right. Of all bots, Kore was unique: it was the only open source bot. Now, what was open source again? Open source means that anyone can view, modify and redistribute the source code. It may sound crazy to some people, but that is the sole reason why OpenKore exists today, and why I'm maintaining OpenKore. It encouraged people to contribute improvements back into the community, so that everyone can benefit.

Kore had one fatal flaw though: Kura, the original author who wrote Kore, didn't do anything with most of the contributions. Most contributions are just laying on the forum gathering dust, while Kura only merged a few contributions back into the main Kore program. It shouldn't come as a surprise that many contributors were not happy about that. As a result, many forks of Kore emerged.

A few prominent Kore contributors at the time were: Kura, Karasu, Solos.

Did you say "fork"?

Yes.

<img src="/images/fork.jpg" alt="A fork!">

No, I'm not talking about that kind of fork! The forks I'm talking about are separate versions of Kore, maintained by other people. For example, one of the contributors, Solos, made his own version calledSolos Kore (skore for short) which includes his own improvements. There were other forks, but not much is known about them. For some unknown reason, Kore's website went down for months, and Kura was unavailable during all that time. So all the users who used Kore moved to skore instead. Soon skore became the most popular Kore fork.

This is not to say that Kura isn't a brilliant guy though. He was. His technical skills were very high, and he wrote most of Kore's codebase. His project management skills could use some improvements though.

Skore seemed to have replaced Kore, but Solos had the same flaw as Kura: he didn't really merge contributions back into the main program. As a result, more forks appeared, this time based on Skore. To make matters worse, after a few months Solos mysteriously left - he probably lost interest in RO. Things became very ugly after that:

• iRO was upgraded to Comodo, which broke a lot of bots. Bots couldn't detect some players and monsters. As a result, not only could bots easily die, they also kill steal people.
• There were still contributors on the Skore forums. A fix was released by those contributors, but only Solos had access to the website (where the download page resides). So the modified Skore version, which was called Skore-revamped by the authors, was released by posting download links in 'sticky' topics on the forum!
• The download page on the Skore website was never updated though. So lots and lots of people tried the version on the download page, which didn't work, and came to the forum to complain that it didn't work - without reading the sticky topics on the forum which link to Skore-revamped.

We received new complaints every day.

Zzz.... tell me about OpenKore already!

OK OK, I'll go to the point! Obviously things couldn't go on like that. I had a lot of experience with open source project management, and it surprised me that neither Kura nor Solos used collaboration tools such as CVS. So I teamed up with the other Skore contributors, and founded the OpenKore project. OpenKore is based on Skore-revamped. OpenKore would not make the same mistake that Kore and Skore made:

• The OpenKore project encourages developers to unite and to cooporate. So that means less forks, not more.
• Through the use of collaboration tools like CVS (kindly offered by SourceForge, which hosts many open source projects), many people could work on OpenKore at the same time, thus increasing efficiency greatly.
• Multiple people could update the OpenKore website.

So if I ever leave RO or get hit by a bus, the other people can pick up where I left without having to reinvent the wheel over and over again. The "Open" part of OpenKore emphasises OpenKore's open source nature.

The original Kore website came back online, this time hosted on SourceForge (just like OpenKore). But Kore was as good as dead - Kura left the scene shortly after.

Prominent developers at this time were: xlr82xs, blueviper22, junq, Dn4cer, brokencard and myself.

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