Hey all. Listen I was thinking, TWX, SWATH, and ATTAC are the dominat helpers here on the market, and they are all GREAT. Each has its own strengths, and the programmers that made the projects, Xide, Earth, etc. have worked their Butt off...

But what if we started an open source Helper?? I've noticed that alot of great open source projects have grown to staggering proporsions (sp)

Look at Linux, Appache, hell there are alot of "Open Source" programs that allow the users to edit/create/and change settings to make the program the best.

ZOC is very flexiable, but I was wondering if anyone was intrested in going in on a project with me, creating the first "Open Source" helper. Completely open source and free...

We can take comments from around the community, to create a better more flexiable helper. Although it would be very, VERY hard to make anything better than what the current developers have done. Many props to Xide, Earth, and the whole SWATH team, but I still think it would be a great learning experince, and a new way to develop some new tools and tactics for the game...

Ideas??
e-mail me;
daniel_e_higginbotham@yahoo.com

Not to dissuade you, but you've overlooked Mr. Don's Kokua helper. It is an open source helper written in Java. And props to him.

I think you need to come up with something ingenuitive instead of another run-of-the-mill helper. I think this is why TWX Proxy is so popular... because its ingenious, and filled several niches that few even knew existed. I think the TWX Sync Server is a good example of a new product.

Let me throw out one more opinion too. Open source is a phenomenal movement in the software community, but often works poorly on a small scale. There may not be enough willing developers or motivation to see the project through to the end. In that case, it would be better to make a pay-for-use program, so long as that provides the motivation to complete it. I'd rather pay for a good program than freely use a limited one.

Having said all that... feel free to drop me an email and bounce a few ideas.

+EP+

I actually had the same thoughts about 6 months ago and I also wanted a helper that would run on Linux. I wrote much of the helper and I think it combines my favorite features from existing helpers -- the quick hotkeys and easy script execution of a full helper and the flexible scripting and data mining features of TWX (and its ability to send mulitple keys at once).

Unfortunately, I have lost interest as I'm working on some other projects that have taken precedence. I have a bunch of scripts written but I still need many more before this would be a fully usable helper. If you know Perl or are willing to learn Perl I could certainly use some help on this. Check out my website here: http://www.linux.kaybee.org:81/tabs/perltw/.

I think EP hit the nail on the head: think of something new. For example, while it seems like a good idea to write a new helper that uses some new cool scripting language, the bottom line is no one is going to use it until your helper is used by a ton of people, and that can only happen by convincing them it is good enough in the first place. A chicken and egg sort of problem.

I'd suggest, no matter what kind of helper you write, assume folks will be using twxproxy with it for scripting. This lets you focus on your cool new capability that no one else has and not waste time reinventing the wheel. Another perhaps better approach would be to pick up an existing open source helper like Kokua, J-TWAT, this Perl one, or now TWXProxy and add features to it because it is certainly not trivial to write a helper and easy to get discouraged before you get anything usable.