Odin Project

Extensible multipurpose Active Worlds bot application
Powerful, innovative, versatile, cross-platform

By P. J. McDermott
Active Worlds citizen PehJota (#363069)

Current version: 0.0.1 - build 1
Status: Development/alpha
Development start: Sept 9, 2009
Released: To be announced
Changes

Odin is a new project currently in development. At my current rate of progress, I may have at least a private (maybe even public) beta in January.
See the Roadmap for a detailed list of many of Odin's planned features and their progress.

• Download Odin - Get Odin and its dependencies for Windows and Linux
• Installation Guides - Guides to make setting up PHP and Odin easier (for personal computers or external webhosts)
• Features Documentation - Full documentation of Odin's basic features and configuration
• Odin API - The powerful Odin API
  • API Index - Index of all classes, fields, and methods in the Odin API
• Changelog - Recent changes, improvements, and fixes, along with a peak at upcoming features
• Roadmap - Expansive and detailed list of planned features
• Plugins Repository - Plugins to add functionality to Odin

Red links do not exist yet. More coming soon.

Odin, currently in development, aims to be a powerful, versatile, cross-platform Active Worlds bot application written in PHP to run on a command line interface. It will be highly extensible by way of user- and developer-built plugins. These plugins will make use of a powerful API to control the bot(s) and simplify common tasks such as timing (timeouts and scheduled actions), parse coordinates and object actions, manage user (citizen and tourist) and group permissions, reading and writing of configuration files, and retrieval of remote files via HTTP.

Odin is based on OmniBot, a powerful scriptable multi-purpose bot that was never released (but was seen in worlds like the public build world Besaid and P. J.'s world WHooPLA). Odin will be more powerful and contain a cleaner and more organized API and extension engine. Eventually, Odin will have all of the same features as OmniBot, plus much more. Also, I plan to port most or all of the OmniBot scripts I wrote to plugins for Odin.

For more information, see the official Odin project announcement.

Odin is considered the primary god in Norse mythology. He is associated with wisdom, war, magic, and poetry. He is also a shapeshifter. Read this Wikipedia article on Odin for more information. I chose this name because, much like the Norse god, this application can take any shape and perform just about any imaginable task in Active Worlds. Also, Odin's associations seemed to fit the concept of AW bots.

Well, Odin is a leisure project with one developer. And that developer likes to work slowly (and often rewrite code multiple times) to make everything as good as possible. So I have no idea when I'll have a public release built. Come back to this site or watch the AW forums for a release.

If you want to follow Odin's development, watch the API Index in the documentation. I'll try to write the API documentation as I go. When I start working on higher-number builds, I'll also log changes in a changelog.

Odin is designed to make AW SDK programming simple and dynamic in a language that's easy to use and comfortable for many people. It will have dozens of powerful, never-before-seen features (like fully-featured simulated events and callbacks with virtual attributes, easy management of an unlimited number of bot instances, and transparent in-world speech and interface internationalization) to make just about anything possible and easy.

Did I mention it's also cross-platform? And although there is no native GUI for Odin (to save on resources that GUIs waste), I plan on adding support for the use of local and remote GUIs to connect to Odin when they are needed (thus saving your resources when you don't need a GUI, and letting you access your application remotely).

Go to the Roadmap to see many of the major features planned for Odin.