creating a new customizable, free pickup-bot -- lf for coders

13 years ago

Yo,

Currently the community lacks of a free , reliable and customizeable bot for the irc.
Free in terms of ‘can be run by anybody who wants to’ (and open source too!).
Reliable in terms of not going down every other week as the pixel pickup is currently doing (no offense).
Customizable in terms of being multilingual, supporting any gamemode (6on6, koth-shit, ultiduo, hl), supporting any map pool and so on.

Speaking of myself, I got in touch with this topic when I’ve coded the bball bot which is running very well (even tho barely used and not that feature rich). I’m really confident we can pull this off.

—

It’s a little bit of work and maybe a little much for me, so I am looking for coders who could help me out. The bball pickup bot mentioned before is written in Java. So we have something where we can start from. However I want to port it to Python (for obvious reasons). Please tell me / us what you think could be improved / should the focus be set on etc.

Summary of things I would like to see in the bot:

* custom game modes
* custom map pool
* multilingual
* multi game server support
* afk feature
* online statistics
* seeding based on players’ skills

If you’re interested, message me on IRC (nTraum / nTraumOFF).

Last edited by nTraum, 13 years ago

Spike Himself

13 years ago

Your main concern will most likely be interfacing with rcon replies. Valve may decide to change this at any point and it can really mess up your bot if it’s not coded to deal with this. (see recent update that changed return value of the status command – tf2lobby is still broken if you have stv on your server now, to throw in a random example)

longas

13 years ago

Contact with Chris, he was making one afaik.

Last edited by longas, 13 years ago

Skyride

DUCS

13 years ago

Quoted from Spike Himself

Your main concern will most likely be interfacing with rcon replies. Valve may decide to change this at any point and it can really mess up your bot if it’s not coded to deal with this. (see recent update that changed return value of the status command – tf2lobby is still broken if you have stv on your server now, to throw in a random example)

The solution is just to use A2S. It’s safe to assume to that it’ll work, since unlike TF2Lobby, it’ll only ever be used by servers under your control.

In heinsight, the 2 biggest things I would have done different when creating the pixel pickup bot would have been:

1) Build the actual pickup code to use a properly object-orientated state engine. It started off as this, but I didn’t leave any room for flexibility which meant that after months of adding new features, half of the state data is in a barebones object, and the other half is in a horrible mish mash of global variables.

2) Multi-threading. Or better yet, just write it in a different language that actually supports multi-threading. The bot could be so much better if it was. Right now what I need to do to make even a simple 60 second wait before doing something is mind-bogglingly backwards.

Also I don’t know why people think my bot is unreliable. Sure it has it’s problems, but none of them are actually in any way related to the bot itself. They’re all to do with outside issues. I.e. You do occasionally have to reconnect to quakenet. This isn’t an issue when you’re just chilling with mIRC at home, but when you have a bot that sits connected 24/7 for weeks on end, it happens occasionally. I didn’t want to make it reconnect automatically.

Last edited by Skyride, 13 years ago

nTraum

\V/ Gold
LAME

13 years ago

then join me, skyride. :)

octochris