rkfg/ns2query

A Discord bot to query Natural Selection 2 game servers and announce the number of people playing there

NS2 Query Bot

This is a simple bot that queries the Natural Selection 2 servers and sends messages to the specified Discord channel if there are enough players to start the round.

Compiling

Grab a Golang installer or install it from your repository, then run go get -u github.com/rkfg/ns2query. You should find the binary in your $GOPATH/bin directory. Alternatively, clone the repository and run go build inside.

Configuration

Copy the provided config_sample.json file to config.json and change it to your needs. You should put your Discord bot token to the token parameter, put the channel ID to the channel_id parameter (it's the last long number in the Discord URL: https://discord.com/channels/AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA/BBBBBBBBBBBBBB, you need to copy the BBBBBBBBBBBBBB part). query_interval specifies the interval (in seconds) between querying the same server. All servers are queried in parallel.

Then setup the servers you want to watch. name can be anything, the bot will use it for announcing, address should be in the ip:port form (where port is the game port + 1, i.e. if you see 27015 in the Steam server browser use 27016 here). player_slots is the number of slots for players and spec_slots is spectator slots. The bot uses those to post "last minute" notifications. status_template is an optional parameter that defines the bot's status line. It's used to quickly see the server status without asking the bot directly. The status is displayed on Discord as "Playing ...", you can specify the format in this parameter using Go's template syntax. See config_sample.json for a full example with all available variables. tl;dr variables are used as {{ .VarName }}, all other characters are printed as is. The variables are: ServerName, Players, PlayerSlots, SpecSlots, FreeSlots, TotalSlots, Map, Skill. Hopefully, they're self-describing.

id_url is an optional per server parameter that lets you specify an URL that serves a JSON with player Steam IDs that are currently on this server. You can user this mod to grab them and then provide web access to the file using any avaliable web server. The bot will announce connecting players that are in the database using their Discord tags. The announce will be delayed by announce_delay seconds, if more known players join during that period they all will be announced altogether. It's a simple rate limiter to prevent spam. regular_timeout is a period of time in seconds after which a known player (aka regular) that left the server is forgotten by the bot and can be announced again. This is to prevent multiple announces in case the player leaves and rejoins in a short time (because of a crash or otherwise). If you want these announcements to go to a different channel, set regular_channel_id.

If you already have a database that's been populated before these changes, run the bot with --reindex to fill the Steam ID => Discord index. All new players registering themselves with -bind will be indexed automatically.

The users section lets you specify the Discord IDs that have special privileges. Currently it's only used for the -bindu command that's not shown in the help message because it's special. To use it the user must be defined in the users section as "123123123": "admin", only admin role is defined by now and it only allows access to -bindu. This command allows to bind a steam ID to any Discord user and is meant to be used by admins to populate the database. Call it as -bindu DiscordName#3333 https://steamcommunity.com/id/steamprofilename. To unbind any user call -bindu DiscordName#3333.

The seeding section defines the player number boundaries. Inside that section there are two most important parameters, seeding (the bot will announce that the server is getting seeded when at least this many players have connected) and almost_full (it will say that the server is getting filled but there are still slots if you want to play). The cooldown parameter is used when the number of players fluctuates between two adjacent states. For example, if the seeding parameter is 4 and some players join and leave so the number of players changes back and forth between 3 and 4, this cooldown parameter is used to temporarily mute the new messages about seeding. It's the number of seconds after the last promotion (getting a higher status) during which demotions (lowering the status) are ignored. If the server empties normally, then after this cooldown period the seeding announcements will be restored.