[Discord bot for DCS] DBS (Digital Bot Simulator) by Asta☠

[astazou]

Hello,

Almost 4 years ago I did a Discord bot to share to players what is the current mission on the server, mission time (to see if it's day or night), and even see who is flying on a server without need to start DCS.

So I did something using Node.JS + Discord.IO.
But it's not a very neat solution because it means each server owner needs to create and host his own Discord.

The best solution would be ED to has his own Discord bot because all those data are already available:

Then, only one bot would be existing, and server owners wouldn't need to host their own Discord bot to connect their server to their community Discord.

Of course I opened to ED a ticket to see if there were interested (maybe 3 year ago?), at this moment we didn't give a next.

I continued to develop my bot, I shared a bit more information, server's password, SRS version and parameters for example. But those data would not be accessible from a ED server (I guess, but I may be wrong):

But one day, the Discord.io framework wasn't supported anymore, so I had a redo a part of the bot, but the bot was still working, even today is still working, so I postponed a lot before redoing the bot.

In the same time, I saw other Discord bot for DCS, for examples https://github.com/DCS-gRPC/Custodian or https://github.com/Special-K-s-Flightsim-Bots/DCSServerBot , but it wasn't the same language (remember, I basically choose NodeJS) and it wasn't the functional possibilities I was looking for. I don't really want to manage my DCS server, I prefer to create more "social" interactions between the DCS server and the Discord server.

The last months, I finally re-did the entire bot to migrate from Discord.io to Discord.js and I also redid the lua part.

Now, the current bot is sharing more data, and I called it :

DIGITAL BOT SIMULATOR

The server automatically says when the DCS server is OFF:

And I also create a channel to follow what's happening in the mission, as you can see, I can share lot of events :

During a dogfight we can see:

And sometimes an accident:

For now, I share almost everything, but I'll make an easy true/false panel to let the admin chooses what he wants to share on the Discord.

I'm also trying to find a solution to talk from the Discord channel to the in-game DCS chat.
I already did something working with the old bot, still also working:

But the technical solution wasn't very clean, so I prefer to investigate and see if I can do something better.

If you want to see the bot running, you can have a look on my Discord server: https://discord.gg/ZUZdMzQ .

For now I'm still working on it, but yes :
I plan to make it available pushing it to Github with a guide for any admins to download it and use it on it's own server.
I just don't know when.

If you have any questions, please, do it in a public place (on this topic or in a public channel on a Discord, you can also find me on the official DCS Discord server or on the modding hub Discord server) ). I don't want to answer in private because your question(s) could interests other players.  

See you soon

Asta☠

[astazou]

Ok, I've now a better solution for the link between the ingame chat and the the Discord channel

I'm gonna push it to a friend for test purpose, if everything is fine, I'll write a guide and I'll publish it

[astazou]

Hello DCS servers admins

Today is the day, I just released my bot!

You'll find here the instructions and the files to download it:

https://github.com/frasta/DCS-Discord-bot

I hope you'll enjoy it

see ya

[NatoAviator]

Hey, awesome work...I've followed the steps on GitHub, but stuck here...where do I download?

• Shutdown your DCS server - Done
• Install node.js link (tested and working well with 18.14.0 and 19.6.0) - Done 
• Create folder where the bot will be installed and go inside using the Windows Command Prompt (CMD) - Done
• When inside, type npm init - Done 
• Install node plugins npm install discord.js - Done
• Download and unzip the .zip file - I'M STUCK HERE, where do I go to download?

Edited February 20, 2023 by NatoAviator

[astazou]

1 hour ago, NatoAviator said:

Hey, awesome work...I've followed the steps on GitHub, but stuck here...where do I download?

• Shutdown your DCS server - Done
• Install node.js link (tested and working well with 18.14.0 and 19.6.0) - Done 
• Create folder where the bot will be installed and go inside using the Windows Command Prompt (CMD) - Done
• When inside, type npm init - Done 
• Install node plugins npm install discord.js - Done
• Download and unzip the .zip file - I'M STUCK HERE, where do I go to download?

 

Hey,
The best away is to click the "release" button link and download the zip (as for the A4 mod and SRS)

you can also hit the green "< > Code" button to download the project.

See ya

[Snoopy]

Was starting the install and a lot of the reference images in Github are no longer loading.

 

[astazou]

On 2/25/2023 at 6:25 PM, Snoopy said:

Was starting the install and a lot of the reference images in Github are no longer loading.

 

Hi @Snoopy, I just uploaded all the images directly on Github, it will be fine now

[Padinn]

Mine was working well and then today on start up I am getting an error. Any idea whats up?

null

[Maverick87Shaka]

2 hours ago, Padinn said:

Mine was working well and then today on start up I am getting an error. Any idea whats up?

null

I'm not using this scripts, but it looks like there is another process that is using the port 14802, and the program can't start since it's unable to use it.

Try to restart the system, should fix the problem.

[Padinn]

Reboot did fix it, ty

[MarkP]

Ohh thats neat! Im trying it right now.
Can you clarify which ID goes to which "line"? I understood it that we have 4 IDs: Bot itseslf, broadcastchannel, textchannel, and whats the 4th? The Token?

And to which const goes which ID? Thats unclear to me.

-Ive put the bot token to the config.json
-ive put the broadcastchannel-id to channelLiveID
-textchannel-id to messageLiveID
-bot-id to botID

whats the 4th: channelTchatID?

 

Thanks for the work!!

Edited March 17, 2023 by MarkP

[astazou]

1 minute ago, MarkP said:

Ohh thats neat! Im trying it right now.
Can you clarify which ID goes to which "line"? I understood it that we have 4 IDs: Bot itseslf, broadcastchannel, textchannel, and whats the 4th? The Token?

And to which const goes which ID? Thats unclear to me.

 

Thanks for the work!!

Hi,

With this screen it should help:

Blue: ID of the Discord channel "live" (where you have the technical info' from your server)
Yellow: ID of the message in the channel "live" (you need to make it appears first using !init)
Purple: ID of the channel "tchat" (where you can talk between Discord and the DCS ingame tchat and also see the events (connections, slot, takeoff, ...))
Green: ID of the bot.

 

[MarkP]

hey, yea. Just saw it down below x) i was confused since in the first screenshot in the howto there were already all 4 columns filled. Thanks.

 

I just got it working. Man. Thanks! Its awesome!!

 

edit: two questions.

1. The IP of my server is static and i have a DNS record for it. Is there any way to set the IP in the config to be the dns record? 
2. Is there a way to provide a autostart?

 

Edited March 17, 2023 by MarkP

[astazou]

On 3/17/2023 at 11:49 AM, MarkP said:

hey, yea. Just saw it down below x) i was confused since in the first screenshot in the howto there were already all 4 columns filled. Thanks.

 

I just got it working. Man. Thanks! Its awesome!!

 

edit: two questions.

1. The IP of my server is static and i have a DNS record for it. Is there any way to set the IP in the config to be the dns record? 
2. Is there a way to provide a autostart?

 

 

Hey, just saw your edit messages
1) Yes, you can "hard code/write" the IP adress with the bot, line 196, or close, at this line:

messageToShow += str_DCSip+"**"+myIP+":"+linesDCSConf[i].split("[\"port\"] = ")[1].split(",")[0]+"**\n";

you can replace the variable "myIP" by an IP adress (for example here: 123.123.123.123):

messageToShow += str_DCSip+"**"+"123.123.123.123"+":"+linesDCSConf[i].split("[\"port\"] = ")[1].split(",")[0]+"**\n";

 

2) Sure, I'm doing it myself, I use Windows task scheduler to run a script starting the bot, I recommend you to have a look here:

See ya

[Nishiyandcs4]

hi, Asta!
i have tried many  times, but no matter what i do, the result is this.
i know this BOT is so great, but i'm sad that i can't make it work on my multi server.
any idea what might be causing this?
(sorry my poor ENGLISH. i'm Japanese.)

[astazou]

3 hours ago, Nishiyandcs4 said:

hi, Asta!
i have tried many  times, but no matter what i do, the result is this.
i know this BOT is so great, but i'm sad that i can't make it work on my multi server.
any idea what might be causing this?
(sorry my poor ENGLISH. i'm Japanese.)

Kon'nichiwa @Nishiyandcs4,
Don't worry, your english is more than good enough (and I'm really not perfect neither )

I read "Unknown Message" and a 404 status.
It means you made an error on an ID.
Can you re-check your IDs according to this draw?

BotID (green) : ID of the bot
channelTchatID (pink) : ID of the channel where you are connected with events (and in-game tchat) of the simulator.
channelLiveID (blue) : ID of the channel where the bot will display the data about the server (name, password, players online, version, etc....)
messageLiveID (yellow) : ID of the message of the bot after your made "!init" for the bot to get his message

If those 4 IDs are correct, it will work


Oh, and @Snoopy tested the bot with several DCS instances, it's working! Thank you again for the test
You "just" need to duplicate the number of bot and redo the same.
 
Enjoy

[Nishiyandcs4]

Hi, Asta, thanks for the quick response! !
Yes, I have set it up as you said, but the result is the same no matter how many times I run it.
In rare cases, "Server Offline" is displayed on the channel set as "Message Live ID", but it is the same display on the CMD prompt screen.

Also, sometimes I get an error like "unable to send".
It looks like the bot is trying to access channels with these IDs, but for some reason it is unable to access these channels.

When I tried CTRL + click on the URL of the screen where the error is displayed, it will be displayed as

{"Mesage": "401: Unauthorized", "code": 0}.

Is this correct?

[astazou]

6 hours ago, Nishiyandcs4 said:

Hi, Asta, thanks for the quick response! !
Yes, I have set it up as you said, but the result is the same no matter how many times I run it.
In rare cases, "Server Offline" is displayed on the channel set as "Message Live ID", but it is the same display on the CMD prompt screen.

Also, sometimes I get an error like "unable to send".
It looks like the bot is trying to access channels with these IDs, but for some reason it is unable to access these channels.

When I tried CTRL + click on the URL of the screen where the error is displayed, it will be displayed as

{"Mesage": "401: Unauthorized", "code": 0}.

Is this correct?

If the bot it started, you can't run it again until it's stopped.

unable to send => Are you sure about the rights of the bot? On the Discord and on the channels?

I gave you URL from Github, weird, here is the same screen from Discord =>

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/559138601573548052/1103554191584149536/image.png

Keep us in touch

See ya

[Nishiyandcs4]

Hi Asta!
I didn't want to waste my time with too many issues, so I really started over to sort things out.
(Including Bot installation, node download, other settings, etc.)
Then, mysteriously, the problem was solved all at once, and the Bot started talking 'very very very lively' inside my server.
I don't know much about Bots and programming like this, so I still don't know what caused it,,,,, but I learned a lot in many ways.
Thank you for this wonderful bot including your response!

[Nishiyandcs4]

Hello! Asta.

The DBS bot on my server is speaking very well!!

but...
I have another question,

1)　 Why doesn't "Server Offline" show up when the server is terminated?
Even if the server is terminated, the live channel display will remain intact. Any special settings in index.js or BDSGameGUI.lua?

2)　 Is the "Started since" display of the live channel not updated unless there is an event such as someone connecting while the server is running? Is it possible to have the display refreshed somewhat automatically (e.g. once every 5 minutes)?

3)　 Only the file name is displayed when the server is started, but if you change the mission file, the file path without .Miz will be displayed in the "Mission" display of the live channel. I'm running a dedicated server and the files get rebooted every 4-5 hours. Also, players in the server can arbitrarily change the file. In any case, the file path is displayed except at startup.

It would be helpful if you could tell me if you have time.

Thank you.

Edited May 6, 2023 by Nishiyandcs4

[astazou]

6 hours ago, Nishiyandcs4 said:

Hello! Asta.

The DBS bot on my server is speaking very well!!

but...
I have another question,

1)　 Why doesn't "Server Offline" show up when the server is terminated?
Even if the server is terminated, the live channel display will remain intact. Any special settings in index.js or BDSGameGUI.lua?

2)　 Is the "Started since" display of the live channel not updated unless there is an event such as someone connecting while the server is running? Is it possible to have the display refreshed somewhat automatically (e.g. once every 5 minutes)?

3)　 Only the file name is displayed when the server is started, but if you change the mission file, the file path without .Miz will be displayed in the "Mission" display of the live channel. I'm running a dedicated server and the files get rebooted every 4-5 hours. Also, players in the server can arbitrarily change the file. In any case, the file path is displayed except at startup.

It would be helpful if you could tell me if you have time.

Thank you.

 

Hi,

Let's answer.

1) What I use on my side, is a windows script which is shutting down, the bot, DCS, SRS, restart the bot (to have the offline info) and then shutdown the server

TASKKILL /F /IM SR-Server.exe
TASKKILL /F /IM node.exe
timeout /t 10
TASKKILL /F /IM DCS_server.exe
timeout /t 15
cd "C:\botDBS"
pm2 start index.js
timeout /t 10
shutdown -s -f -t 3

More info' here:

 

2) It shows the mission time since the mission started. What you ask is technically possible but I didn't want to have a loop/while check if there is nothing new on the server, to avoid the bot to spam the Discord API.
What I do on my server, I keep only the server "resume when client connected".

3) I don't understand the problem. The problem is sometimes you see the path? If yes, it's not a big issue.
The problem is the mission name is not changing when you change mission? It changes for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Nishiyandcs4]

Thanks for your quick reply! !
I understand your reply. I apologize for repeating the same questions as other members.
Anyway, thank you for this wonderful bot.

[Padinn]

I'm noticing an error in the log:

2023-07-11 13:51:55.116 ERROR   LuaHooks (Main): [string "C:\Users\Carmen\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta_server\Scripts\Hooks\DBSGameGUI.lua"]:232: bad argument #1 to 'gsub' (string expected, got nil)

 

Seems related to the code that cleans up strings. Any thoughts? 

[astazou]

18 minutes ago, Padinn said:

I'm noticing an error in the log:

2023-07-11 13:51:55.116 ERROR   LuaHooks (Main): [string "C:\Users\Carmen\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta_server\Scripts\Hooks\DBSGameGUI.lua"]:232: bad argument #1 to 'gsub' (string expected, got nil)

 

Seems related to the code that cleans up strings. Any thoughts? 

I need to have the log before to see what's going on.
Probably a problem of special character? (?!/\|'&"...)  Tell me when you find it and I'll see to correct it

[Machinegun417]

C:\ServerBot\bot>node index.js
Listining to  Address:  0.0.0.0 Port:  14802
Listining to  Address:  0.0.0.0 Port:  14803
Ready!
My public IP address is: 104.183.201.147
C:\ServerBot\bot\index.js:301
                chanelTchat.send(str_serverOFFshort);
                            ^

TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'send')
    at updateLiveData (C:\ServerBot\bot\index.js:301:15)
    at C:\ServerBot\bot\index.js:113:4

Node.js v21.2.0

Can you help with this error?