World domination via IRC.

The bot is designed to make developing plug-ins as easily as possible. Plug-ins are loaded dynamically. This means that you can edit the source code of a plug-in, tell the bot to “!loadplugins”, and have the changes you made become live. The advantage comes from the cost of restarting and reconnecting to an IRC server, which hurts development efficiency.

The bot's framework is build on twisted. All plug-ins implement the ICommand interface (located at derp/pluglins/ICommand.py). Implementing the interface allows the bot to identify which plug-ins it should try to load.

The an actual plug-in is an instance of classe implementing ICommand. This means that consecutive calls (commands) to a plug-in will be going to the same object (this is not true if you re-load the plug-in). Since the same object is being queried, you can have state within your plug-ins. This means that writing a game that has state becomes trivial. Of course, you could hold state in a database, but that is messy.

Don't do it yet. Let me make the bot more stable so you don't have to re-write anything later down the road.

When you implement the ICommand interface the bot will attempt to load your plug-in. If your plug-in is loaded (right now you need to check the logging output) it will receive a “bundle” of resources that your plug-in has access to. All the resources are mapped by keys in a dictionary. The actual resources it get's are in brain.py in the function contemplate(). Here are the resources.

• mouth - This is the instance of the underlying protocol class. You can use this to write to the wire. For example, bundle['mouth'].msg(“#osu-lug”,”ponies”) will send the message “ponies” to the channel “osu-lug”.
• user - This is the user that triggered your plug-in to be called.
• channel - The channel in which your plug-in is being called from.
• msg - The full message that the user said when activating your plug-in. For example “!someplugin perameter1 perameter2” would be in the bundle.
• idea - The command itself. In the example above, idea would have the value “someplugin”.
• sensory_input - Just the parameters. In the example above, sensory_input would be mapped to the string “perameter1 perameter2”.
• conn - A connection object to the logging database.
• cursor - A cursor object that is pointed toward an sqlite3 database that is logging everything happening in the channel from which the plug-in was called from.

To load plug-ins you need to put your nick in the global configuration file under admin. Send a personal message to the bot asking it to “!loadplugins”. Watch the logging output. The bot will attempt to verify your identity with NickServ before loading any plug-ins, so make sure your nick is registered.

More documentation is to come...