Installation Guide

These installation instructions will guide you through the processes of downloading and compiling SteamBot.

Install Git (optional)

Find a Git installation for your platform and install it. On Windows systems you can use Github for Windows. Whatever you install, it should provide a command prompt shell or integrate with an existing system prompt.

Getting the Code

The code may be downloaded from GitHub via cloning or downloading the snapshot zip file.

Go here to download the NuGet package manager.

This will place SteamBot's needed external dependencies in SteamBot\packages\. Once these are downloaded you have all the files needed to compile the source code.

Compiling the Code

To compile the source code use your favorite C# IDE to open the solution file.

Development was done in Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 and MonoDevelop and both of those IDE can be used to compile the code. Visual Studio does provide a free "Express Edition" that can be used and MonoDevelop is a free and open source IDE.

After Nuget install, restart VS. After the restart, try to build the solution. If it doesn't work, go to Tools -> Options -> Package Manager -> Then tick on Allow NuGet to download missing packages during build. Retry to build the solution, and it should work.

Once the code is compiled it should output an executable to SteamBot\Bin\<type>\SteamBot.exe where <type> is either Debug or Release depending on what you have selected. The default will generally be Debug. If you are testing and debugging your code this is fine but it should be changed to Release when building for a deployed environment such as running the bot full time on a server.

You can now move to configuring your bots via the settings.json file.

Note, if you are using MonoDevelop and get an error similar to:

The type or namespace name "ProtoBuf" could not be found in the global namespace

then the work around is to build the solution twice. This error occurs because MonoDevelop doesn't contain a way to specify build order, and certain projects within the solution must be built before another (mainly protobuf-net needs to be built before SteamKit).

Visual Studio 2010 does not have any issues with the build order because the solution file was created with Visual Studio 2010 and it specifies the build order correctly. If you are using a different version of Visual Studio (like 2012, or 2008), you may need to respecify build order in the solution.

Configuring your Bot

Using the settings.json file is the main way to configure the bot. See the Configuration Guide for detailed information about using this file to configure your bot