Hey guys,
You all know our Botman-Bot, that cool thing that allows players to have nice commands like /home and /day7 on our server. It’s really great, a full package, I can recommend it almost without hesitation (go for the hosted option).
It has a lot of features we don’t use though. It’s also not the most configurable / extendible. It provides nice protection, but lacks a lot of functionality we desperately wish for. And since it’s written in some obscure scripting-language nobody understands (lua) and also relies on a lot of ‘outdated’ technology like IRC, it might not be the most future-proof solution. Technically, it runs a third party tool on a linux machine, polling the games telnet, listening to an IRC channel on the IRC server we have to run for the bot to provide an interface to the bot without having to be in the game. The Botman-Bot developer is currently working on a web-panel, but it has been promised since a15, and I really don’t want to wait any longer.
So I started a search to find other more suitable projects we can expand on, only to find that there are none. There’s CBSM, which seems to be discontinued and pretty much dead. There’s a ton of mods that provide the functionality, but needing to be compiled and built. I seriously like the remote aspect of the Botman-Bot, so I have decided to write a bot that works the same way.
My choice of programming langue fell to python, as it has fairly simple threading support and also has a robust telnet-module.
I have hacked together a simple bot in the past week, just to find out if the plan to write my own bot is realistic. And since I haven’t coded anything in python before (the past five years I’ve been happily selling beer to people, lugging around crates of it :), I have to rely on simple to understand solutions for my problems, else I will end up with a bot I don’t fully understand and therefore one I can not improve upon myself in the future.
I am fairly certain that I can write a bot, I will be lacking in exception handling and security and stuff like that though, I will need help there to make the thing real-world ready. For now it’s a plaything for me to learn python.
I would appreciate any kind of help. May it be improvements on my code, comments on how I could do certain things better and so forth. For now you can have a look at the git-repository of my bot, see if you spot anything where you might provide insight or practical help.
Contact me on discord, post in the #chrani-net-bot channel or use the GitHub for questions and comments 🙂
Enjoy the pre-christmas spirit, enjoy your gaming,
ecv