The Twitch Paints project is an idea that came about from the beautiful anarchy of the Twitch Plays Pokemon project, which allows a group of people to play a single video game by collectively controlling it using simple chat commands (e.g. left, right, start select). It was an experiment that remains wildly popular. The Twitch Paints project will allow similar chat command control, and allow a chat-room full of people to create collective visual art as well as music.
This guide will show you how to establish your own bot to test and run your own scripts and plug-ins for use in developing the vision of this collective nerdy project.
To make this guide as comprehensive as possible, I have also included steps on setting up a linux OS test environment, and how to configure and run your own bot.
Step-by-step guide
To contribute to this project, these are the necessary steps.
- Install an emulator/live-boot linux OS
- Install, configure your test bot
Installing your own Linux OS:
| This first step isn’t technically necessary. Though using the same environment for both testing and deployment is recommended, python can be installed in Windows, and comes installed on OSx. For a good simple tutorial on downloading and using Python in windows, watch this video http://www.twitch.tv/thegamedevhub/b/296128360 |
- For those of you who do not have a linux OS to work on, we need to install to a flash drive a bootable linux distro that is emulatable in Windows. To get started, go to http://www.linuxliveusb.com/en/download and download the LiLi (Linux Live USB Installer).
- Plug in your flash drive to a USB port.
- Run LinuxLiveUSBCreator[version #].exe
- Select the drive letter of your USB flash drive.
- For “Choose a Source”, select “Download”
- Choose “Ubuntu” for the easiest option, but any distro should work.
- Click Download Automatically
- Make a sandwich while you wait for the distro to finish downloading.
(Image courtesy of Wikipedia) - If there are files on your drive and you would like to delete them, select the “Format the key in FAT32”
- Click the “CREATE” button to finish installing. Grab a beer, the installer is easy and fool proof, and will take care of everything for you.
- Once finished, browse to your flash drive files, and open the VirtualBox folder.
- Double click on “Virtualize_This_Key.exe”, and your linux OS will boot up virtually in a new window!
Congratulations, you are now running your own Virtual OS!
Now we need to install and configure the IRC bot.
- From linux, open up your web browser.
- Navigate to the page https://github.com/jtripper/plugin-based-irc-bot
- Select “Download ZIP”
- After downloading, open file
- Extract “plugin-based-irc-bot-master” to any folder, or even the desktop
- Open the “plugin-based-irc-bot-master” folder
- Right-Click on “config.py”
- Select “Open in gedit”
- Change the first line of text to: hostname = “irc.freenode.net”
- Feel free to edit the nickname, username, and realname options to something other than “Dat_Bot”
- Change the channel to: channel = “#ecwebdev”
- Add your own username between the quotation marks next to the bot_master variable
- Save the file and close gedit.
- Navigate to the “plugins” folder of the “plugin-based-irc-bot-master” folder.
- Delete the twitter.py & twitter.pyc files from the folder. (twitter plugin requires dependencies that need to be installed. If you do not plan on using the bot to tweet, it is much easier to just delete the plugin)
- Double click the “main.py” file from the “plugin-based-irc-bot-master” folder.
- To verify the bot is up and running, join the #ecwebdev channel of irc.freenode.net from you favorite IRC client (mine is built into thunderbird), or use the web client by going to http://frigginglorio.us/bot/ , and entering the captcha.
Congratulations, your bot is now installed and running properly!
