Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today, I am tailoring my simple Discord dice bot for an upcoming role play. Let’s get started!
Project History
A while back, I built a very simple dice bot for Discord [1]. In its current form, it can be used for rolling an integer number of dice with another integer number of sides (3d6, for example) provided at runtime. A lot of effort also went into learning the Buildah/Podman OCI container implementation so I could clean up afterwords if something got messy. In the end, I managed a container with a mounted volume I could reprogram on the fly without entering the container.
Containerization with Podman/Cockpit has been treating me very kindly. This week, I was able to add environment variables on container creation, allowing me to work a bot token and branch label into the container itself. I also created separate development/production branches for short-term testing and long-term operation respectively, though in effect, I’ll also be keeping an old version around to act as a “stable” branch which will have its code integrated into the container itself instead of relying on an attached volume.
During this week’s work, I figured out how to test code segments directly in the interpreter. I also played around with separating core functions out of the main .py program file, and found they imported cleanly into the live interpreter. As a result, my debugging efficiency improved quite a bit.
Total Rewrite
There is a meme out there where a programmer can write a program such that only he and God know how it works – after a time, only God will know. A good programmer will return to such a problem with ideas for a more elegant solution, though it usually means rewriting from scratch. The core dice rolling functions for my first dice bot were hacked together and barely able to roll an arbitrary set of XdN dice where X in the number of dice and N is the number of sides.
This time, however, I’m programming for a game with non-standard dice faces. No way was I going to shove that into my old bot core. Instead, I spent around eight to ten hours crafting a new monstrosity I can reuse for other bots in the future and handles multiple types of die pips on a side at once. I focused on hacking it into my existing bot code (which I have yet to fully decipher), but it wasn’t so bad. What I do know is that I obsoleted several bits of code and about half as many comments intended for future work on that ugly line of development.
My new functions begin with the assumption that N can be defined as a list of sides, which in-turn list their respective kinds/counts of pips. For when N is int type (integer), I have some code to build a die face-by-face in that format. All the dice are loaded into a list, and that list is passed off to another function to actually roll the dice and tally up the results.
Worth noting is that I’m starting to make git commits to savestate my progress. I’m not worrying about proper form right now, but I’m counting on improving over time.
Settings Files
The ability to save/load data –while not strictly needed for a simple dice bot– is an important skill to develop. My brief research showed that while there’s any number of ways a Python programmer may implement settings, a somewhat standardized and end-user friendly method is using .ini files. While I may not use them this week in this project, I will want to remember this side goal. I’ve invented my own scheme before, and it wasn’t fun.
Takeaway
It’s really difficult to communicate all the little challenges that come up without looking/feeling like an idiot half the time because I missed something and another half because of the jargon. I’d have to say most of the time I spend coding is trying to understand what I just wrote. I still haven’t completed all the features I need, so the plan is to cover the rest of this revamp in next week’s post.
Final Question
What were you working on the first time you successfully extracted a part of your program into a separate document?
Works Cited
[1] Shadow_8472, “My Discord Bot Understands Strange Dice,” Feb. 28, 2022. letsbuildroboticswithshadow8472, [Online]. Available: https://letsbuildroboticswithshadow8472.com/index.php/2022/02/28/my-discord-bot-understands-strange-dice/ [Accessed Aug. 29, 2022].