Telegram chatbot to serve as a moderator to a weekly challenge in the video game TrackMania Nations. The rules are simple:
Every week a track is chosen for the participants to race on. This track is hosted on an online multiplayer server for the entirety of the week.
A weeks winner is the one to drive the fastest time over the course of the week. All times have to be scored on the before mentioned game server. On 0:00:00 every monday the game server shuts down and a winner is announced.
The overall winner is determined by summing the personal bests for every track. The participant with the lowest overall time wins.
Participants who fail to score at any given track will be assigned a time that has been beaten by all other participants for that track. This time is chosen from the medal times of that track.
The bot will provide the following services for the proceeding of the challenge:
Announce rankings at the end of each week in a shared groupchat of all participants.
Inform participants about live changes in this weeks rankings by posting in the groupchat.
Show graphs and tables of weekly and overall rankings when asked.
Help players connect to the game server.
Registration of player names to be displayed in rankings and graphs.
This bot requires a database of tracks and player times to connect to that is continuously filled with the times scored on the game server. Since TrackMania Nations is an old game this will require some setup work with legacy technology that proved notoriously tricky to handle. It is therefore strongly adviced to use the docker images created by @fanyx for this very project. Check out his work:
fanyx/docker-tmserver for the online game server.
fanyx/docker-xaseco for the database server.
fanyx/docker-tmnationsbot for a containerised instance of this bot.
The main part of the the interaction with the bot will play out in a shared Telegram groupchat that all participants have to be a part of. Before this can be utilized some setup work is needed.
Contact the @BotFather and create a new bot by texting him /newbot.
Follow his instructions until your new bot is ready to go.
Once the bot is created he will send you an access token. Copy this token into the corresponding entry of the config.ini.
Start the bot.
Create a groupchat to which you invite the bot. Post the command /chat_id to the groupchat. The bot will respond with the groupchat id. Copy this id into the corresponding entry of the config.ini.
Restart the bot.
Now you can invite all the participants into the chat. The bot will introduce himself to each new participant in private message to explain how he can be interacted with.