Lance: A Pokemon Showdown AI
Disclosure
Credit goes to the Percymon project built in Node.js, on top of which this AI is built. Percymon is a Pokemon battling AI that runs on the Pokemon Showdown server.
Setting up the repository
To set up the server, you need to first install dependencies:
npm install
This project requires Node.js >= 4.x, as it requires ES6 class support.
In order to actually play games you must register an account on Pokemon Showdown. Once the log-in information has been obtained, you need to create an account.json file containing information. The format of account.json is as follows:
{
"username" : "sillybot",
"password": : "arbitrary password",
"message" : "gl hf"
}
The battles themselves take place entirely on the Pokemon Showdown server, so it's best to have a second account with which to use the built-in spectate feature offered by Pokemon Showdown in order to monitor the AI.
The message field indicates the message that will be sent when the bot first connects to the game.
Finally, to start the server, issue the following command:
node bot.js
By default, the server searches for rated OU games when the option is toggled in the web console, which is bound to localhost:3000 by default. There are several command line options that can be supplied:
--console: Only start the web console, not the game playing bot.
--host [url]: The websocket endpoint of the host to try to connect to. Default: http://sim.smogon.com:8000/showdown
--port [port]: The port on which to serve the web console. Default: 3000
--algorithm [algorithm]', "Can be 'minimax', 'mcts', 'samcts', 'expectimax', 'greedy', or 'random'. Default: samcts
--account [file]: File from which to load credentials. Default: account.json
--nosave: Don't save games to the in-memory db.
--nolog: Don't append to log files.
--startchallenging: Start out challenging, instead of requiring a manual activation first.