TL; DR: RaiderBot is for Pokemon GO Discord chats to help organize raids.
I maintain and distribute RaiderBot free of charge. However, if you enjoy it, please consider donating either directly through PayPal or becoming a patron on Patreon These contributions keep me caffeinated well enough to continue to develop, improve, and support RaiderBot and other bots like it!
Pokemon GO's raid mechanics is a pretty interesting twist on an Augmented Reality game. It forces players to come together and coordinate in order to receive better rewards than they could get alone. However, there is no in-game mechanism for organizing raids. This makes it risky for some players to go out of their way to get to a location, only to find that no other players were going to that raid (or even knew that raid existed!).
The first solution to this problem was the organic establishment of communities. Sub-reddits, Facebook groups, Group Mes, Hangouts, and Discord are all examples of places that Pokemon GO regional groups have established themselves. In my area, near Madison, WI, we have mostly settled onto a single Discord server.
On the server though, the following situation was fairly common:
Person 1: There's an Articuno at the Memorial Rock starting at 3:00. Anyone interested?
Person 2: I've got 2 people, we can make it there by 3:20.
Person 3: I can come, but only if it starts by 3:05
Person 4: We can't make it
Person 5: I'll do it at 3:10
Person 1: So...
At this point, there's typically several other people on the server waiting for this to resolve before they commit, until finally the time passes, and no one is going because no one else said they'd go too.
This problem gets even worse when the server has overlapping sub-regions. In that case, the above conversation could be happening in "#downtown" and an entirely separate conversation could be happening in "#northside". With better communication, the raid could have happened.
With RaiderBot, we get to add another layer of organization. When you set up RaiderBot, you give it permission to manage messages in the channels that your raid groups are using. Using the above example above, the chat would instead look something like this:
Person 1: There's an Articuno at Memorial Rock starting at 3:00
Person 1: !raider new 3:05, Articuno, Memorial Rock
RaiderBot: 3:05 Raid (4X) created by @Person_1 for Articuno at Memorial Rock
Person 3: !raider join 4x, 3
RaiderBot: @Person_3, added to raid 4X owned by @Person_1 Total confirmed is: 4
Person 2: Can't make that, sorry.
Person 2: !raider new 3:45, Articuno, Memorial Rock, 2
RaiderBot: 3:45 Raid (9J) created by @Person_2 for Articuno at Memorial Rock
Person 4: !raider join 9J, 4
RaiderBot: @Person_4, added to raid 9J owned by @Person_2 Total confirmed is: 6
And so on and so forth. In other channels, anyone could type !raider info 9j or !raider info 4x to post information about that raid, including time, location, pokemon, and a list of current attendees.
Probably the simpliest thing you can do to learn how to use the bot is type !raider help which the bot will then PM you a list of the available commands.
MORE COMING HERE.
Option 2 is listed first because Option 1 is way more work, but I expect more people to go that route.
This is the much simpler option for many, but would not be free. I have a VPS with a 99.99% uptime SLA, so your RaiderBot would only be down during catastrophic failure. Additionally, your code would be updated to always be current with each patch.
The recommended method of running RaiderBot is to host it yourself on a server capable of running Node applications. There's quite a bit of setup involved, but I've done what I can to simplify this. For now, I'm assuming you're running this on some local machine or a remote server that you have shell access (and thus can treat it like local). Note about Heroku: I did not design this with hosting elsewhere in mind. I did work on a heroku build for a little, but couldn't get it stable. If you want to go that route, consider yourself warned.
There's tons of documentation on how to install node and npm. I may flesh out this section later, but for now, you should get them installed.
This one's actually optional but HIGHLY recommended. If you're going to do all the rest of this, you probably want to pull from this repository. If you have git, you can watch this repository for updates and bring them into your own copy with very little effort. I personally recommend GitKraken for this. They don't give me anything to say that, although I wish they did. I'll modify these sentences if that ever changes.
Another optional. You've probably got something already, but having a dedicated code editor is really helpful. I use VS Code and love it.
If everything else is set up, this is where it actually starts to get easier, but it DOES assume you know how to use the command prompt in your OS (Windows, OSX, or *nix)
- Create and open a directory for RaiderBot.
- run
git initin that directory to create an empty repository - run
git pull https://github.com/dpalay/RaiderBotCongratulations. You should know have all of RaiderBot's files in the directory.
It's time to get some things put in!
- run
npm installin the directory with the files.
- This will install all of the dependencies for Raiderbot locally. Raiderbot uses several other libraries
Head on over to Discord's Bot creation page and make yourself a shiney new bot! For now, I suggest 1 bot per Discord server ("Guild", in Discord speak)
- Click on "New App" and give your bot a good name. Pick a fun picture to represent it and creat it!
- Important step Your "App" isn't a bot yet. To do that, you need to click the "Create a Bot User" button on the page that opens up.
- Take a look at the Client ID and the Token. We'll need those for the next few steps.
- Time to invite the bot to your server. You can only do this for servers you own. Head over to https://discordapi.com/permissions.html#93184 and enter your Client ID from step 3. Then, click the link provided on the page.
- Select the right server to add the bot to, and Double-check that everything looks right. Once it does, Authorize the bot to join the server.
- One of the files in the repository is
config.json.example. Copy that file and name it justconfig.json.
config.jsonis the file where we're going to be storing some VERY secret and important data. **DO NOT POST YOUR config.json file to any websites or add **
- The sample
config.json.examplefile contains placeholders for the information for you to put in, such as your discord Token and Bot's user ID. - Replace the
Your secret Token for this botwith the token from step 3 ofCreate a botabove. - Replace the
The discord user id of the botwith teh Client ID from step 3 ofCreate a botabove. raidChannelswill only be useful if you're using PokeAlarm's webhooks to post raids in your server, and is currently only if you use the same PA config that we're using on the Madison server. If you're not doing that, then just leave this as"raidChannels": []- Save your
config.jsonfile.
If you did everything up to this point, you should be all set. There are two ways of starting the bot:
node Raider.js
- This is a great way to test changes to the bot, since the log outputs to the console. However, if the bot crashes, then it does not reboot.
npm start
- This actually launches another command:
pm2 start Raider.js. PM2 is a process management option designed for node. It startst the process as a background process, and will automatically restart the process if it crashes. Additionally, it comes with some pretty sick monitoring tools, and I'm currently adding integration into the Dashboard it comes with.
That should be it. This is the first project that I've done that would potentially be large-scale, so your patience is appreciated.