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Yo,

So I've set up my own little server, and so far everything has been going swimingly. However I saw on the wiki quite a few server administration tools that I would like to try out. What I would really like to do is be able to run a script that roughly does this:

If (playersInServer == 1){
   say "you look lonely, here's a friend"
   addbot sarge
}

From what I learned on the IRC this is not possible natively on the openarena server client. I was told to try Big Brother Bot, but that seems really heavy for what I need my server to do, plus it requires mysql, which I rather not clog my system with. Do you guys know of any lightweight server bots for openarena or possibly a way to run this type of script from the server?

If you only need to add a bot character when not enough players are in the server, but you don't really need to specify a certain bot or to display a custom message, you may simply use bot_minplayers <min_players_number> instead: that automatically adds and removes bots to fit the min players limit specified (in team-based games, the value refers to each team). Bots are chosen randomly. Skill is selected accordingly to g_spskill value.
(DO NOT LINK) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Manual/Multiplayer#Commands

I'm sorry I can't help you with advanced tools that automatically send messages etc.

There are several bots similar to B3 for UrT (http://www.urbanterror.info/forums/topic/23556-server-setup-guide-tools/). Most of them do statistics and bans as well, so they require some sort of database.

If you're on a Unix system, you might script your own, using cron, some rcon tool (e.g. multircon (http://aluigi.altervista.org/papers.htm#q3)) and grep/awk/whatever to parse either /status or use (qstat and) getInfo reply and look at g_humanPlayers.

Yea the multicron option looks like its the way to go. I originally thought of doing some bash scripting while also using something like sed or grep, but I wasn't sure how to run a script that actively sends a command to the server, and then parses that command.

Also grey matter:

Do you have any suggestions on how I would write my own script to interact with the server output?

If you know a bit of Python, I strongly advise to use Big Brother Bot, it's the easiest way to do what you seek, because a plugin is easy to write for this bot, and it always maintain a lot of infos about the server (number of players currently connected included).

Also, you could simply edit the OAX gamecode to send a message prior to adding bots with bot_minplayers. This would probably be one line of code. But it is not very advised since you will have to make your server unpure.

Allright, so incase anyone is still wondering I found the perfect solution (for me anyway).

I found this program called crcon:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/crcon/

It did exactly what I wanted, which is output commands like "status" and "systeminfo" into bash shell. Now I can run bash scripts using crcon and use sed to parse this information and call commands on the server accordingly. I am still getting some weird errors that I need to figure out such as when I type:

./crcon -p "password" -P 27961 localhost 'status'


I get:


????      map: ztn3tourney1
num score ping name            lastmsg address               qport rate
--- ----- ---- --------------- ------- --------------------- ----- -----



And I'm not sure why those question marks are there. I am still trying to figure that out.

I think this is a great alternative to big brother bot especially for me. I did not see any refrence to this except in some long forgotten forum post, so maybe I will add to the wiki regarding this program and how to write a simple script with it. I will add to the wiki if you guys think its necessary.

It's okay for me. I suppose you may write a "crcon" page in the wiki, where you may explain how to use that tool, and then place a link to it in the "tools" section of the "servers" page.

Actually, that's a perfect candidate for a server-side only mod. This won't require any downloads on clients and does not cause any problems with sv_pure 1.

The four '?' are start of each OOB text command in Quake 3 (see NET_OutOfBandPrint()), the "print" text which is also included is stripped by crcon.

Yes but the server admin will either have to set sv_allowdownload 0 to avoid clients to autodownload it (which may conflict with their install), or use a trick by setting fs_game to a random name so that the game thinks it's running on a mod, and so it will avoid forcing clients to download pk3 that resides in .openarena(localfolder)/baseoa.

I think it should not be advised unless the admin is experienced with "tricking" the engine.

But that indeed would be the easiest. I think that reworking the autodownload facility would do a lot of good and allow for such customizations to easily happen. But that's a bit off-topic ;)

Just drop vm/qagame.qvm into home or basepath, preferably under baseoa/. No downloads needed. That's how server-side mods work ever since.

I have edited the wiki mentioning crcon and linking to its download location. I will add its own separate page to the wiki sometime next week. Also I will make a github repo as a lot of the code can be edited to work better with openarena.

Good.  :)

@grey matter: indeed, you're right, please excuse me for having forgotten this method!

@hemite: good news! Your code will be very much appreciated :)

Here is the github repo for crcon, everyone feel free to fork.

https://github.com/hemite/crcon

EDIT: The wiki page is up:

(DO NOT LINK) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Crcon

Thank's a lot!

But are you sure that changing this variables does not amper any other function?