POC - ReactOr Client - Modern Frontend for UO Interactivity

[vempa]

Hey,

I assume quite a few people have heard me yammer about something strange I've been doing over the last couple months.
At last, I think it's presentable enough to share a few images/explanations of.

Motivation:

For the longest time, I've been bugged by how limited UO helpers are.

There's no IDE (integrated development environment) support, each one has it's own funky syntax and they're all
severely limited in their capabilities.

Want a database? Have fun implementing your own. Want to use industry standard packages/utils? tough luck.

The pinnacle of despair, however, is when you, in your folly desire a UI for your scripts.
UO UI is insidious. It's incredibly frustrating, limited and performs badly to boot. A literal nightmare to work with.

These problems cannot be resolved from within the existing ecosystem.


This project, is my answer to the above. A fully modern application to interface with UO-Orion and provide capabilities never before seen.
It abstracts the nastiness that comes from interfacing with Orion and provides with a high level, modern application & programming interfaces to make your wildest dreams come true.

With this, you gain access to everything modern software engineering has to offer.

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The left hand side of the UI is a direct command interface that allows executing arbitrary Orion commands;
This is just for the R&D process and does not reflect final product.


Also, please note, I'm not really a UX/UI guy. I mostly deal with backend in my day to day so do excuse it being a bit on the ugly side.
I'll be improving the look & feel whenever I get a chance.

ReactOr-Main.png (26.33 KiB) Viewed 4810 times

ReactOr-Sidebar.png (49.59 KiB) Viewed 4810 times

Current list of features:

• Cross-platform & responsive (I don't guarantee it'll look good on your phone but I do try to make sure it's usable)
• Can run normal Orion scripts
• Health/Stamina/Mana bars
• Chat tracking with full history
• Customizable chat filtering with Regular Expressions
• Discord integration (able to send messages)
• Connection indicator/Character name badge
• Logout button
• Theming support (i.e., dark/light, snow vs desert etc.)
• Integrated database
• Direct Command Execution (more of a developer feature)
• Custom UI elements (Logo, Connection indicator and sidebar handle designed/rendered by me. Just being a showoff here heh)

I'd very much appreciate your input on this.

I'm currently debating whether I should publish but am also inclined to take donations/payments for this as R&D has proven very time consuming.



For the developer/tech-savvy among you, here are the technical details:


Key stack components:

• Typescript
• Electron
• React/MobX
• SQLite3
• TypeORM
• HandleBars

Interesting Points:

• Frontend | Backend-for-frontend | Backend (ReactOr-Server) design.
• Custom communication protocol - A *very* simplified TCP-like protocol over UDP, a bit reminiscent of RPC
• Fully typed Orion integration - Invocations are done as true, typed functions.
• Arbitrary Script Execution (ASE) capabilities - (risky but mostly mitigated by Orion being so restricted)
• Task scheduler/batcher - performance was taken into consideration.
  Tasks can be executed as standalone or batched operation to reduce the number of IPC calls
• Chat searching/filtering - The system is designed to handle pretty high scale. Search filtering is done via a TRIE for
  simple matches and Regular Expressions for complex ones.
  The chat database table is indexed to allow efficient searches by any parameter (speaker, time, order, origin etc.)
  If the data grows too large, I may add a Lucene based engine as well.
• Flexible DAL - Database layer design allows for multiple different data-sources, for example Atlas

Limitations:

• The ReactOr Server (a separate script that executes directly on Orion) must be running in order to receive communications
  from the application
• Due to issues in Orion itself, the script selector must always be on the ReactOr-Server script in order for it to function properly
• Orion allows a maximum of 30 threads at any given time. The integrated batch executor is designed to partially mitigate this issue
  but it's still noteworthy.
• Arbitrary Script Execution (ASE) does not have typings. (ASE refers to execution plain JS scripts provided by the user)
  I'm considering several venues by which this can be improved upon but this is a lower priority item, for now.

If you've found this relevant, wish to donate or are otherwise interested, do leave a comment, either here or in-game.

Have a nice day,

V

[Geriatric]

ill be the first to admit i really dont understand any of the other stuff this can apparently do or intend to do... but that little chat window sure has me intrigued, and while apparently UOEX has a function where by the chat logs are recorded it sure would be nice to have its own little add-on or whatever just purely for chat

[vempa]

Hey Geriatric,
To clarify, this is a fully fledged application that can run on Windows, Mac & Linux and provides a platform on which you can do whatever crazy things you want with UO, for example, control your scripts via handy buttons, even route chat to discord (i.e., chat in UO via discord or similar service)

UOEX site is also very limited in the capabilities it exposes. You have very limited history and no 'local' (non-world chat) messages.
I've the option to view/search chat years back, and record local communication as well (but not PM's at the moment)

[Cerrera]

Good luck with project, looks interesting.
Don't understand much but am guessing that is some ''translator'' between apps .
Is it capable of doing something by its own (like assistant) , or its just used to control other apps?
one of points answers on this question, but i better re' ask .

[vempa]

Hey Cerrera,
Thanks.

I wouldn't classify it as a 'translator'.
I'm using Orion as infrastructure but this has capabilities far exceeding Orion's so I can say it's very much capable of doing stuff on its own.
For example, you can browse your recorded chat without even having UO installed.

It does have a 'translation' element to it but its definitely not the only part to it.

You can look at it this way- its just a normal application that's also able to interact with UO. Whatever you do with it is up to you, essentially

[MagicUser]

Wow! This is amazing.

For support I have to recommend expanding beyond Excelsior. I could be completely wrong, but I am not sure there are enough scripters on this shard that are at that level of Orion scripting (stretching the limits of what Orion can do) and are also willing to donate enough to make your efforts worthwhile.

If you're looking for things that I think are at the limit of what Orion can do, I do have some things I could chat with you about. Not a ton, but anyway, up to you. You've definitely hit the nail on the head for 2 of them. Hotrod's update to journal handling makes journals a lot easier, but it definitely has its limits. Namely that it doesn't take much to just crash the client. The UO guis are workable, but more support is definitely appreciated. Can't tell you how large my gui.oajs file is to make it easily expandable. Some solutions are super janky. And sometimes some features like button-less setting changes are actually impossible.

Best of luck.

[vempa]

Thanks Paroxy.

I'm not aware of anything new Orion does with journals, unless you mean the usual flags and such.
In any case, thanks for input I might take this out to the Orion community in general, although the platform is kind of agnostic- I can basically interface with any assistant that has a basic server capability (not sure if there are others, right now).

V

[okojava88]

Introducing a modern frontend that integrates industry-standard tools and provides a user-friendly interface is a game-changer. The ability to leverage modern software engineering practices, including access to high-level APIs, is invaluable for creating innovative and efficient solutions.

Don’t worry about the initial UI/UX design; functionality and usability always come first during development. With continuous refinement, the look and feel will improve over time. For inspiration or support in enhancing the user experience, you might want to explore collaboration with a front end development services company that specializes in modern web and app interfaces.

Looking forward to seeing how this project evolves! If you’re exploring resources for front-end improvements, this might be useful:
[link redacted]

[+Colibri]

Introducing a modern frontend that integrates....

Hey okojava88, your post seems to me like an advertisement for a website or service that doesn't have much to do with UO (though it's related to this topic. This seems to be your first post. Do you play on this shard or have tinkered with UO development?
https://www.cl---everoa----d.com/servic ... velopment/

[+Colibri]

Late to the party, I remember seeing this when it was posted but probably not much time then to read and reply.

From what I understand, it's a cross-platform assistant program, which in the backend is an injection program (like razor/easyuo/uosteam) acts as a client to the server and a server to the client, being a man-in-the-middle, to be able to be aware of the state of the game, but also push thru some actions so that macros are possible.

The thread is from 2 years ago, but I see that you're still active here on Excelsior. Are you still using what you have made so far, or made any progress since then?

Anyway very interesting to see this.

[vempa]

Late to the party, I remember seeing this when it was posted but probably not much time then to read and reply.

Hey @+Colibri,

Yeah, it has been a while, heh.
I'm still here, when circumstances allow (war, health etc.) and still develop it when I can, amongst other projects.


Regarding arch - If I understood you correctly, then, yes, basically.

It uses Orion as an 'executor' of sorts, since I didn't feel like reversing UO's protocols and couldn't find something better that suited my needs.
All the heavy lifting is done in Node JS/Electron with a modern React interface with an SQLite DB for storage.

Most recent developments were:

• Computer vision integration (via OpenCV) for fully automating beehives
• Location aware, configurable music player - I really love the T2A music and I wanted it back, in a proper way.

When I get back to actively working on it, I'll probably go for a 'plugin hub' of sorts so I can stop using orion standalone altogether and just run everything directly from the app.

Been considering releasing it publicly but it's a bit rough around the edges since it was mostly for fun/my own needs.