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Celeste's guide to Bots
There are two kinds of bots on the moo. One is simple and one is more complex. Both extend the puppet class and so can be controlled by you directly. Neither currently implements a way to turn them off so they do not act autonymously. Neither will talk unless there is one and only one person in the room with it. Neither will speak before recieving some sort of message from you. If you put more than one bot in a room with you, they will talk to each other after you speak. Let's talk first about simple bots.
Simple Bots
The bot tracks boredom via the length of your sentences. If you utter less than a certain number of words for a certain number of replies you will be deemed bored (or boring, depending on your perspective) and the bot will stop grabbing it's replies from the filler array and grab one from the starter array. All of it's replies, once it decided what array to use, are completely random. It may come up with the same one several times in a row. You can make it more or less bored with the verbs more_bored and less_bored. You can make it's desired sentence length more or less talkative with more_talkative or less_talkative. And you can add phrases with the verbs add_answer add_starter add_filler and add_greeting. If you accidentally put in a phrase you don't like, you can elminate it by useing @notedit to manipulate the arrays directly. Starter should be filled with long sentences that might start conversations. Like "The 49ers ought to fire Joe Montanna. He's too old. And I just saw him in a Mervyns ad." Filler should be filled with phrases that are interjected into the middle of somebody else talking, like, "oh", "cool", and "really?" Answers should be as noncommital as possible, since you have no way of knowing what sort of questions you may be asked. "I dunno" works well.
Complex Bots
init MyBot starter #1074 created filler #1075 created greeting #1076 created #1077 created to match statements ending with ?Remeber those object numbers! You add your phrases directly to them. To add a text reply (MyBot says, "text reply"), use the object number and add_text. So it's add_text "text" to [obj]. Adding a pose is the same, except the verb is add_pose. add_text "hi" to #1076 "hi" added. add_pose "waives" to #1076 "waives" addedYou want to treat these objects, Starter, Filler, Annswers (match statements ending with ?) and Greetings like you did with simple bot above. But this can be a bit more complicated. Complex bots respond to poses. They can also be set not to repeat themselves until they exhaust all their avilable phrases. To make a certain reply manager not repeat, use the verb no_recycle. to turn it back on, use set_recycle. The init program set a bunch of this up for you. It also sets it up so that if somebody tells you bot "hi" or "hello" it will reply with a greeting. You can also add your own pattern matching. To see how the regular expression stuff works on the moo, check out ftp://ftp.lambda.moo.mud.org/pub/MOO/ProgrammersManual.html#IDX40 You can add your regular expresion before the greetings and ?'s, so it gets checked before they do, or you can add if after. If your pattern matching reply manager is after the greetings and asnwers one, then it gets evaltuarted after them. This means if you're looking for the keyword "barbie," and some user types "hey, do you like barbie?" it will treat it as a regular question and not use any of your barbie specific phrases. The patterns are known by the reply managers, not by the bot, so you can add other people's patterns matchers to your own bot (so it can have the same personality as somebody else's bot). To add a pattern evaluated after existing patterns, use add_pat. To put it before the existing ones, use perpend_pattern. add_pat any to bot. Any can be a text string to be used as a pattern (in this case it creates a new reply manager) or an existing reply manager. add_pat "foo?*bar$" to MyBot #1078 added prepend_pattern #1073 to MyBot #1073 addedTo change the pattern, use the verb add_pattern add_pattern "^foo%|bar" to #1073 Pattern on #1073 set to "^foo%|bar" Lets' say you get very tired of your bot and want to get rid of it. Don't just recycle it! If you do, you will have weird unnamed objects in nowhere that you own filling up the database. But never fear! Just use uninit. uninit MyBot should recycle every reply manager attached to MyBot. If you are using some reply managers for more than one object, son't run uninit, but be sure to recycle all of the now unused reply_managers by hand. Lastly, we come to the advanced section. How do we reorder pattern-matching reply managers. there is no way I know of to do this from the command line of the moo. You will need to write a small program to do it yourself. Here is some example code that I just cut and pasted in all at once:
@verb bot:fix this none none
@edit bot:fix
enter
if (player == this.owner)
this.pat_table = {#429, #1055, #747, #1064};
player:tell("fixed");
else
player:tell("Permission Denied");
endif
.
save
quit
fix bot
@rmverb bot:fix
There is currently no way to automatically convert a simple bot to a complex one. So if you
decide your simple bot is too simple, you will have to cut and paste all her phrases over by
hand. After that much work, it seems a shame just to throw the onld on the scrap heap, so there
is a bot graveyard. (#795). there all bots can sit for all eternity to all babble on at once
if anybody goes in to talk to them. They all will eternally greet each other. It's kind of
sad.
That's it! Any other gestions, send me mail. |