It's not part of PC at all.. When he finishes it, it'll just be a program he runs that connects to PC just like any person would.
To amplify a bit, one of the limitations of Paragon Chat is that it doesn't have a central server like the game did in the sense of doing things everyone could see. The only server we have is basically a communications hub that lets all Paragon Chat users (that log into it) tell each other what they are doing, so I see what you're doing and vice versa. But that means the only things you can see are what you do with your character, and what any other player does with their character. At the moment, no other entities exist, and nothing else happens.
Bots provide a way for programmers to potentially innovate some features within Paragon Chat, by creating computer controlled "players" that do things other players could see. For example, how do you make badges work? Well, imagine you're a player, and you could log in to Paragon Chat and watch the positions of all the other players. You could, when a player stood next to a badge location, send them a chat message saying they found that badge. All you'd need to do is memorize all the badge locations and watch all the players movements twenty four hours a day and send the right chat messages at the right times. Of course, a person can't do that in practice, but they could do that in theory. And because they can do it in theory, you can write a program to do it for you. You know have an automated servant logged into Paragon Chat doing that for you, and you have a sort-of badge system working, even though there's still no server that can award badges to anyone.
I believe this all started when Paragon Chat was first announced and/or released, and the subject of the ski slopes came up. The question was whether it was possible to make the race course work, and the answer was that that was complicated for a number of reasons. I suggested that it should be possible to make a bot that would run the course instead of Paragon Chat itself: you just needed software to log into Paragon Chat, monitor the locations of players, track when they crossed the starting and finishing lines, and time them. A player could, in theory, do that, so a bot could automate the process even better. Obviously, badges could also be done this way. I'm guessing Dyne may have been inspired by those discussions, or may have come up with the idea independently and found the "Technical side discussion" thread where much of this kind of discussion took/takes place.
The point is that Paragon Chat is a program, but its also a
platform. And players have been thinking up ways to use and extend the platform in different ways. Bots are one way. Another way that players have investigated is to use Paragon Chat in conjunction with paper-and-pencil role playing games. One of the very first "extensions" to Paragon Chat that Codewalker added was a way to roll dice. Rolling dice allows PnP gamers to better use Paragon Chat as an interactive role playing game platform. Codewalker is really the only person adding features directly to Paragon Chat - its his software, and he has sole control over it. Others are working *with* it, trying to get it to do interesting things by adding their own work alongside it. Database editors that let you modify your costume in ways the City of Heroes tailor won't ordinarily allow. Bots that track badges. Configuration changes that let you synchronize your Paragon Chat characters to multiple computers. Special keybinds and popmenus to conveniently access features that otherwise you can only do with typed commands. These are all ways to improve the Paragon Chat experience without actually modifying Paragon Chat itself. Only Codewalker can really do that.
