Directions for Running the IRC Bot

This page is largely a repeat of the e-mail i sent Chris Klug containing the instructions for logging in and running the gamemaster bot itself. This only needs to be done by one person, and can only be done by someone who has access to the username and password. However, this page exists to describe some things which may go wrong in running the bot. I hope it will not be necessary, but it exists in case it is.

Normal Bot Operation

Open the Macintosh application Terminal (located under Utilities). When a terminal window opens, type: 

    ssh username@seaborgium-ini.ini.cmu.edu
(using the username i gave you). The first time you do this, you will get a warning message about keys, to which you should say "yes". When prompted, enter the password i gave you.

At this point, you will be looking at a prompt which looks like 

    %
This allows you to enter commands while logged into the remote machine seaborgium-ini.ini.cmu.edu. At this prompt, type 
    ./game.pl
to start the game. You should get the message 
    Logged in as gm
    Joined channel #simcap
If anyone is running IRC at this time, they will now be able to send messages to the user gm, which is the robot.

Things which might go wrong

The robot crashes

This did not happen in any of my days of testing, but it has happened with other IRC robots in the past, and is a known danger of IRC. If it happens to you, simply run ./game.pl again, as above. The program should report 
    attempting to restore state from file
when it starts. The robot saves its state only once per round, so, the most recent game round may need to be replayed, but you should not have to start the game from scratch.

You need to stop the bot for some reason

If you need to stop the bot and start over from scratch for any reason, press Control+C in the Terminal window from which the bot is running. (This is also how you close the bot once the game is over, but the game itself will give you on-screen instruction on when to do this.)

However, because of the backups mentioned above, the robot will attempt to restore your game when it restarts. If this is not what you want, i.e. if you want to start over entirely from scratch, then, before you type ./game.pl to restart the bot, type: 

    rm backupfile.data
This will remove the saved state file, so that you can start the game over.