Our Story
The history of SREBOT, starting from an idea to being the standard for SQB in War Thunder.
Commissioned by ImApollo and first launched as SNLK SQB BOT. The earliest build is running within a week, with match data still entered by hand. Within weeks, the prototype is already being shared with other servers.
The original use for the bot was automating codeblock (diff) scoreboards with red and green lines. You'd run a command, manually input how many of each type there were, and it would update the message above. Zero tracking, zero automation. The style was heavily influenced by TheH0G (Cade) and progavman (Prog), who I met in SNLK.
The project outgrows its original name. SNLK SQB BOT becomes SREBOT, the identity it still carries today.
Lux_ was working on his own bot at the time. We traded knowledge on War Thunder's APIs and community management, back when neither of us knew how to read a winner from a replay. His bot later became Spectra, and the cooperation never stopped.
Frovy shows us the first parser and gives SREBOT a real path toward automatic scoreboards. He had also figured out how to request data from the game and receive immediate point updates, even if he kept the method from us for months. :)
Dagor is introduced and the second parser is integrated, a much more robust one that SREBOT still uses today. The logging pipeline matures around the parser work, making scoreboards more informative.
Squadrons start to take notice. The bot picks up momentum and grows in popularity as more communities bring it into their servers.
Clippi (Sophie) joins, mostly fueled by her hatred of Boris Bot, and takes the lead on the website. She also pushes us off of Replit and onto proper infrastructure, forcing me to actually learn how this stuff works. The site goes live and keeps growing from there.
While attempting to revive the WT Heatmaps project, Flexcoral (with help from a developer-operated research group) figured out rendering of the minimaps and player paths from replay data, later publishing his own parsing and rendering implementations that we based our current methods off of.
The sheer volume of requests to Gaijin forces a change of approach. SREBOT consolidates and partners with Spectra to receive games directly, instead of downloading and parsing every match on its own.
Monetization brings in real income for the first time, funding better servers and helping new features ship faster.
We start supporting a client port of our project, letting other bots build on top of what we made. First up is AXBot, which serves the Chinese portion of the SQB playerbase.
Automated parsing through Spectra, funded development, and a growing community of squadrons define the project today. We're already working on our next product, TSSBOT.