LibrePlanet: Conference/2022/Transcripts/Empowering-community-oriented-play-with-TRBot

== Empowering community-oriented play with TRBot ==
Original event link: https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/empowering-community-oriented-play-with-trbot/

This talk was given on March 19, 2022 from 13:35 to 14:20 EDT.

== Transcript ==
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* Music *

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Great, thank you Michael.

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Hello everybody, umm, hope you've had a nice break.

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Smooth ride - we are back. I'm Amin Bandeli.

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I'm the room monitor for this talk.

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My IRC nick is just "bandeli"

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so if you do have any questions, please try to mention or highlight me on IRC

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so that I can see them easier and relay them here.

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Umm, so...this talk is titled "Empowering community-oriented play with TRBot",

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and will be presented, uh, presented by Thomas Deeb.
Uhh, Thomas is a professional software engineer,

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passionate about software freedom. He has worked in game development for over 6 years and chose to transition

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...umm, sorry, chose to release his debut indie title as free software during his transition to computing freedom.

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Umm, which started in 2019. Thomas has made contributions to many other free software projects,

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including Cinnamon, Nemo, MonoGame, and RetroArch.
Outside software development, Thomas' interests include

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yoga, hiking, and composing chiptune music. So umm, I'm very excited for this. Thomas, please take it away.

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Thank you Amin, really excited to be here.

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So this talk is "Empowering community-oriented play with TRBot". In the middle there is TRBot's logo by the awesome David Revoy.

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So here's an overview of how the talk is gonna go. First I'm gonna describe what is TRBot. Motivation and history of the project.

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The technical workings at a higher level. The community impact of TRBot. Future aspirations I have for TRBot,

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and then we'll leave some time at the end for some Q and A.

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Just a short disclaimer: I'll be referring to proprietary games and platforms that have had some sort of significance

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in TRBot's development and use. I'm not going to be endorsing or encouraging the use of these platforms.

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So, what is TRBot? So, in essence TRBot is software that can play games through text. There's an animation here showing me

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playing my own game, Maze Burrow, using the terminal. Typing inputs like up, down...and it's controlling the game. So, how does this work?

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TRBot has only two requirements. One is a source of text - in this case, the terminal - and then a virtual game controller, which is running in the background. And I'll be

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covering the virtual game controller in more detail later. But the important thing to note here is the text source can also be a chat platform,

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for example, IRC, and therefore anyone can control the game and this is the essence of what allows collaborative play.

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So, motivation for the project. In late 2016, I was on Twitch, and I was searching for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time streams

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- an old 1998 video game for the Nintendo 64 - and I found a stream called TwitchPlaysPaperMario. They were playing the game through chat.

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And before this, I only had exposure to this sort of concept in 2014 with TwitchPlaysPokemon. But in comparison, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

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is an infinitely more complex game. There's 3D movement, there's like many sorts of maneuvers and timing involved.

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And I was just amazed, outstanded, like how did they do this, you know? The input syntax seemed really robust and allowed for great precision.

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So over time, I playe-interacted then joined the stream and played more games with them.

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And then in 2017, TwitchPlaysPaperMario rebranded itself to TwitchPlays_Everything.

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And uh, TRBot got its start around here. There was a rerun schedule that TwitchPlays_Everything hosted for past runs. And these were not short by any means;

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they were over 100 hours long! So it's something people would put on in the background on a separate machine or maybe a separate monitor.

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And I wrote a little chatbot for this to...uhh - for something to freshen up the pace, you know, like taking in commands,

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like IRC commands, to show the rerun schedule, which was hosted on an external wiki. Or, just like bet credits - just something for them to do.

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And then, in 2018 TwitchPlays_Everything was unfortunately slowing down. And at this point I was thinking, you know, what if it dies? I didn't want it to die;

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I loved the collaborative play. And I loved the community. And there were other problems we found with the stream.

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So, the maintainer had some code problems with their solution. It was written in Python, so over time we found that sometimes the inputs would be inaccurate,

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especially for more complex games. Multiplayer support was kinda like hardcoded in. There had to be big changes to the codebase just to add multiplayer.

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And yeah, late 2018 TwitchPlays_Everything unfortunately retired. And so I'm thinking: what now? I really loved the collaborative play. What can I do to help revive this?

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So I looked around: there are streams on Twitch and such, but everyone had their own sort of solution that was custom to their stream and it was like all proprietary and they wouldn't share it.

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So I looked at existing free software bots on code repositories. Most of them were catered towards the TwitchPlaysPokemon-style of play. So, just one input at a time - very simple - nothing that

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could play like Zelda: Ocarina of Time, for instance, in any reasonable capacity. And some of them were also just very specific to certain setups and cumbersome to use.

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So I thought, you know, I had my own little bot for the rerun schedule. Why not create my own collaborative play bot? And TwitchPlays_Everything was very nice and

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provided their Python version of the parser, and I converted that to C# for my own bot. And if you see here in the screenshot, March 4, 2019,

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was the commit added to convert the parser. And also the idea behind this was that anyone else can use their own bot-can use this bot instead of having to write their own stack,

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and overall it would just be great for expanding collaborative play.

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So, some history of TRBot's releases. So on June 6, 2019, TRBot 1.0 was released. This was a fairly barebones release.

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It had collaborative play available, but it was only available through Twitch. It had some sort of console infrastructure,

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but though all these values were hardcoded, you had to change the source code and recompile TRBot to really do much of anything.

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And, the data was stored in text files. This was slow and not very flexible. And, ultimately, this is around when I started my free software journey,

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and I didn't even realize that at this point, TRBot was not free software. So, on January 4, 2020, I added the GNU Affero General Public License version 3,

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that officially made TRBot free software. And why specifically the AGPL? So, TRBot is designed for community-oriented play, and typically this happens over a network.

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And so, adding the AGPL license would give end-users freedom if they're running on a service, say some platform like IRC.

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And also, it would help spread TRBot and knowledge of its existence, really. A lot of this goes on behind the scenes, like when you're playing on a collaborative stream.

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Like you don't really know the tech stack behind the software. So they can look at the software, they can host it themselves, and they can ultimately help improve it.

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And then in April 8, 2020, around this time I was dual-booting on my current machine. I was looking to switch over completely to GNU/Linux.

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And this is the 1.5 release, and it officially added GNU/Linux support. More on how that was achieved later.

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And then, fastforward to December 8, 2020: TRBot 2.0 was released. This was the biggest release in TRBot's history. It consists of a full rewrite, a full refactor of the entire codebase.

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It's more modular; there's a SQLite database for data instead of text files; there's a whole permissions system for hosts to help manage their streams; features like periodic inputs, and so on.

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And just some more features since version 2.0. Support for free platforms like websocket and IRC. In particular, the websocket is interesting because you can have, say, a website.

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You can display your own stream, on your website. And you can have like a chatbox that you write and connect TRBot to that chatbox,

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which I'd be hoping it goes through the websocket, and then people can play on a website. This is just one of the many use-cases for websocket support.

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Next is custom code. This one is huge. So TRBot has a concept of commands, like IRC commands, and routines, which are pieces of code that run every now and then in the background.

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And so, right now, hosts can write C# code, and TRBot can compile it on the fly and run it as if it was part of the main code by adding information to the database.

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And this allows hosts to dynamically adjust the stream. Like they can change this code, they can add/remove code. And one example of this was I

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used a custom routine to start up RetroArch, a free software emulator. And every hour, it would switch games. So that's just one use-case for this; there are infinite possibilities here.

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Next up is the event dispatcher. This is more catered towards developers of external applications. So, TRBot sends many different events while it's running.

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So say for example, someone types in an IRC channel. TRBot will receive an event and dispatch one over a WebSocket. Who said what and more information about it.

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Whenever it parses an input, it'll send an input event. For instance, this can be used to create like a GUI application to display like all the inputs going on.

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Especially useful for TRBot's democracy mode, which, instead of having players type whatever and it executes it right away, it tallies up the most popular input

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and executes that after a time period - say, 5-10 seconds. It's configurable in the database by the host. And so, the event dispatcher would allow someone to write

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a GUI application that displays all the democracy votes and the most popular democracy input for instance.

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And then continuous integration - this is not particularly relevant to the codebase itself, but thanks to Codeberg's Woodpecker CI integration,

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it's possible to run tests and compile TRBot after each commit. This helps greatly instead of me having to test things manually. I can see like readily if there's a problem and address it.

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And here's just the project structure for TRBot. There are many projects. TRBot.Build, TRBot.Commands...a lot of these are libraries,

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but some of them are applications. So for instance, TRBot.Main in the middle, which is the application that most people will be using if they download it from the repository,

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and at the bottom there's a TRBot data migration tool, which is used for 1.0 releases to migrate the data to the SQLite database in 2.0 releases.

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And what does this structure accomplish? It makes it very modular and extensible. TRBot.Main just glues together everything else to have it function.

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So it glues together the parser from TRBot.Parsing, and it glues together the data from TRBot.Data to achieve its functions.

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And instead of being a monolithic application - otherwise it'd be very difficult to make the TRBot data migration tool at the bottom there

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because that just uses the data and a few other projects here. Instead of having to import everything and kinda build on top of that -

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that would just be very inflexible and kinda awkward to work with from a code perspective.

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So, there's an animation before of me typing, but how exactly does it work? Here's the input syntax. This input syntax is mostly borrowed from the TwitchPlays_Everything

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channel's syntax but with some additions. It looks daunting, but it's actually fairly straightforward - I'll cover it one-by-one.

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So...first we have a controller port at the beginning, which starts with an ampersand followed by the number. So here, "&1" means execute this input on controller port 1.

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If you had two controllers, you can do "&2", execute it on controller port 2. And so on - this supports any number of controllers.

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Next is the modifier. There's hold and release. Hold right here is with the underscore symbol. That means hold the input until the end of the sequence,

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or until it sees a release input for the current input name. And third is the input name right here, it's currently "right".

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Umm...this could be anything, it could be "a", "b" - usually it's a description of the input, like the action in the game.

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And this is actually the only required part of the syntax, you can just put "right" - if it's configured correctly, it'll work.

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TRBot will use data from the database otherwise to fill in the other defaults. For example, the default duration is 200 milliseconds,

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the default controller port is based on the user. Next up is the analog or trigger percentage.

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This supports up to three decimal places for accuracy. Here there's "right 87.341%".

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If you imagine like an analog stick on a game controller, this means you would push the stick to the right almost all the way.

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Not quite there, but like most of the way there. This is used only for like analog or trigger inputs.

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And next is the duration, so here it says "500ms" - that means 500 milliseconds, which is half a second. This can be longer or shorter.

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This is how long to push the input for.

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After that is plus symbol, which means chain with the next input. This means this input this will be executed at the same exact time as the following input.

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If it was absent then it would be right 500 milliseconds - it would wait 500 milliseconds then execute the next input.

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But right now it's going to execute both at the same time because there's a plus. Let's move onto the next input there.

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You see there's ampersand 2, which means execute that on controller port 2. There's a minus symbol there, for the modifier, which is the release modifier.

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So this means release grab on controller port 2. And then the duration could also be specified in seconds, also with three decimal points of accuracy.

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The "3.742s" means 3742 milliseconds, so a little under 4 seconds.

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Umm, here are some examples of me playing SuperTux with TRBot. So, on the first example, you can see it's holding right, and then there's a hash symbol (#) there.

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So, by default, the hash symbol in TRBot is a blank input. What exactly does a blank input mean? That means it's an input that does nothing.

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So, it's gonna wait 300 milliseconds effectively. So it's gonna hold right, then wait 300 milliseconds, then it's gonna push "a" for 1 second.

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"a" in this game is jump. So you can see from the animation at the top, Tux is moving to the right, waiting a little bit, and then jumping.

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And then at the end, releases everything.

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And then at the bottom you can see there's a concept of macros and repetitive sequences. So...

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I'm adding a macro here called "jumplots", and the sequence pans out to "a100ms", which means push "a" for 100 milliseconds.

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And then wait 67 milliseconds. And then that's all in brackets and there's a times 10 afterwards, that means "repeat this 10 times".

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So, it's gonna basically jump 10 times. And you can see from the animation the character is jumping quite a bit.

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And since this stored in a macro, it's possible to just type "#jumplots" and it'll do this sequence.

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Macros can contain other macros - they can contain any number of sequences - as long as they fit the maximum input duration, which is specified in the database.

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And the reason for the maximum input duration is so like, sometimes players troll or if there's like a technical reason like processing too many inputs, and so on.

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And if you're curious about the 500 milliseconds at the start of this sequence - well, certain games, like SuperTux here, unfortunately do not take

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background input unless the window is focused, so here I'm just giving myself time to click on the window for TRBot does its thing.

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And expanding on macros is dynamic macros. So, I create a macro here called "press reps", and then I add parenthesis and then a star in the middle.

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So you can think of this as a function call in languages like C. Whatever I fill in there, in the star, is actually gonna replace what's in the sequence.

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So, the sequence here is a zero in angled brackets ("<0>"). That means argument 1.

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It does whatever that is for 34 milliseconds, and it waits 150 milliseconds, and then it repeats that 7 times.

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So, at the bottom, you can see I have "#pressreps(left)", which equates to left 34 milliseconds, wait 150 milliseconds, and repeat that 7 times.

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And you can see from the animation I'm using it with left and I'm also using it with down. So, with down it would just push down a bunch,

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7 times. And you can see the character moving left slightly, and then ducking a lot.

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And dynamic macros can contain other dynamic macros, it can contain other macros...it can contain any number of arguments.

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If you had, for example, press reps star comma star ("#pressreps(*,*)"), then a "1" in angled brackets would indicate

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whatever is in the second argument replaces the "1".

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And, ultimately, dynamic macros are not validated once they're added. And this is for various reasons.

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You could substitute anything. So, you can substitute the star there, or whatever else you want.

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You can substitute the "7" for the number of repetitions. And there's just no valid way to really validate everything right away once it's added.

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But there will be validation when it tries to parse the input and it finds that it's valid or invalid.

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So there are three different, three major components to how TRBot actually works.

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First is the text parser, next is the virtual controller...and then finally is like the game console concept.

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So, this one is the text parser, I'm just gonna cover it at a fairly high level. So, say someone types in an IRC channel. A message.

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TRBot will do two things. First, it will prepare the string for parsing - it will normalize the string, it'll do things like remove all whitespace or lowercase everything.

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So like "right" in all caps, will turn into a "right" in lowercase.

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Many things so that TRBot can be ready to actually parse it into data it can read.

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The second step is parsing it into input data. So say you have like "a1s", like we saw in the previous example.

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This would create a parsed input structure, internally, with the name of the input as "a" and the duration as 1000.

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Inputs are always processed in milliseconds, just for full accuracy.

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If it was "a1000ms", the duration would still be 1000, for instance.

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Basically, this puts it into data in code that TRBot can actually read and process later on.

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And then, after it's done parsing that, it will validate that data. So for instance, say you have three controllers available on your stream,

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and a player puts something on controller port four. Well, that's just not valid - there are only three controllers. So it'll return invalid for that data.

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Other things it validates include permissions. Say there's a reset button just for the host. If a user inputs the reset input,

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it'll invalidate that if they don't have permission.

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Other things include like the maximum input duration - if it's like 10 seconds and someone inputs something that goes on for 20 seconds, it'll say "no, that's too long".

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And usually it tries to spit out error messages that pertain to where the input went wrong.

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But sometimes it can't successfully do this because it uses regex for parsing. And sometimes it doesn't pick up anything at all.

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So here's the second component, the virtual controller. I touched on this in the very beginning, but here's it in more detail.

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What exactly is the virtual controller? It's a virtual device running entirely in software.

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You can see from the first screenshot on the left here, I have "jstest-gtk" open, and you see "TRBot Joypad 0" at the device "/dev/input/js0".

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It has 8 axes and 32 buttons. And then on the right you can see it in use in Maze Burrow, "TRBot Joypad 0".

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And on that screen in Maze Burrow, you can configure all the different inputs.

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So think of the virtual controller as just one running entirely in software. Like...imagine a game controller in your hand.

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You feed inputs to it by pushing buttons physically, with your hands. But the virtual controller can be fed data through code.

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Just to press and release buttons and axes. And to the computer, it's no different than the physical controller in your hand.

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And here's a high-level overview of how it works. On GNU/Linux, the virtual controllers are written in C using the libevdev library and the uinput Linux kernel module.

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uinput can be used to emulate all sorts of devices, including mice, keyboard, and what have you.

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But here I'm using it to emulate game controllers.

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And so, on the C# side there's a wrapper to this C code, and this allows TRBot to have full control over the virtual controllers.

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On GNU/Linux, aside from maybe...needing write access to /dev/uinput, there's no setup involved.

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TRBot can create all the virtual controllers right there for you. They live as long as the application is.

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And then one huge benefit of this is, say you're a host and you have a single-player game - sorry, a multiplayer game - but you have only one controller available,

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and more people join in the stream.

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You can use the internal controller count command and pass "2" as an argument and it'll get rid of that existing virtual controller and create two new ones, which can be used by your game.

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And then players can successfully play multiplayer games using this. It's just very adaptable having it on the C# side and having full control over it.

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And here is the third component to how TRBot works. Game consoles and input data.

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So, what exactly is the game console? Well, it's just a collection of inputs, essentially.

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Here is it in the SQLite database. You can see "mazeburrow" console, one for "test", various other consoles.

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And they're in the "console" table.

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And then on the inputs below: each input is associated with a certain console. On the first row, there's a "select" input. It has a name of "select".

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It has a button value of 12, it has an input type of 1, which means it's a button.

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And then at the bottom row there, there's the hash symbol, which has an input type of 0, which means it's a blank input.

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Overall, here's where all the data regarding the inputs are stored so TRBot knows how to...what to do with the virtual controller.

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And then touching on that, here's the input handler that glues all of them together.

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So, it takes the data from the parser, the text parser.

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It uses the game console data, and then it feeds all that to the virtual controller.

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And this is a very performance-critical section of code. Imagine pushing a controller on...a physical controller - pushing a button on a physical controller.

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The second you put- the instant you push that button, you would expect the game to react. So, it's the same concept here.

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There's inherently some delay passing data to the virtual controller, and so this needs to be very tight code, especially with the input.

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So let's use the example on the third bullet point there, "a1200ms b300ms+c200ms".

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So, if you're a player on someone's stream running TRBot...if you enter "a1200ms", you would expect the "a" button to be pressed for exactly 1200 milliseconds.

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And then after that, it would move onto "b" for 300 milliseconds.

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So this is why it's performance-critical. There's an expectation there - it needs to be responsive and it overall helps create a better play experience.

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And then regarding how the input handler processes it, let's use the same example. So, "a1200ms". Say "a" is a button with an input type of...

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sorry, a button value of 2. "b" is a - has a button value of 3, and "c" has a button value of 4.

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So, what it'll do is: the parser data will come back, saying oh, here's an input name of "a".

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And then it'll look up that input name in the game console data, and it'll see that it has a button value of 2.

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And so, it'll go to the virtual controller and it sees by default it's on controller port 1, if there's nothing specified.

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So it'll say, controller port 1, which is the first virtual controller device available, it'll push - it'll say, hey, set the value of button 2 to 1, which means to push it.

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To press the input.

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And then it'll wait 1200 milliseconds and say set the value of button 2 to 0, which means release it. Then it'll move onto "b" and "c", except it'll push "b" and "c" at the same exact time.

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And then you'll notice here that "b" is longer than "c". So, after 200 milliseconds, it'll release "c", and then "b" will continue going on for 100 more milliseconds.

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And then because it's a chained input, if there's anything else longer in the chain, it'll wait for that before moving on.

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And then at the end of the input sequence - I've touched on this before - everything is fully released. "a", "b", and "c" will be released no matter what, even if there's a hold.

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This is just how TRBot works; this was based off the TwitchPlays_Everything design.

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I have seen community-oriented play bots that can hold inputs indefinitely, until they're manually released. That's just not a design right now, and TRBot-uh, but it can easily be one.

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So I described how TRBot works. Now, here's some of the community-building features, and I think TRBot has a lot that intrinsically helps build communities.

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So, macros for instance. They can, by default, be added, removed, and modified by anyone.

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So say you have a 3D platformer that is being hosted, and you're a player that comes in, and there's a sideflip action the character can do.

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So, someone can create a macro for a sideflip.

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And then instead of having to manually remember - like, oh, what was the command for this - they can create a macro to do the sideflip,

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and then even a dynamic macro to do it in different directions.

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And so, say a new player joins - well, they can see all the macros available, and do things.

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And maybe they look at the macro and say, "hey, you know, I can do this better and more accurately", and they change it and modify it.

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And there's just like a community dynamic there where people are improving how they play.

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And then the syntax itself I mentioned can be very simple. It can just have the input name.

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But it can also be very complex as I described earlier.

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The syntax can be used by experts very well, but newer players can just come in and just start playing around with maybe just putting the input name, starting out.

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And then there can be some sort of teacher-student dynamic here, where if there's experienced players and newer players on a stream at the same time,

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more experienced players can help guide them. And then the newer players will learn, and they'll be more engaged and they'll be happier.

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And they can make friends and form bonds here. And overall that's just a good experience. It makes them want to continue playing and something to look forward to.

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And lastly, TRBot is free software. So, there are no restrictions on hosting it or modifying it. Anyone can adapt it to their needs.

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If there's, say, like - anyone can also host it and say there's like a stream. A host that wants to just pick it up and use it, they can.

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And if there's another one that wants to do the same, well, then if there's experienced players on let's say one stream, they can just move to another stream

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seamlessly because it has the same syntax and they can just like get right in there and help out with other games.

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So, here is some of the impact that TRBot has had to date.

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So...on December 2020, Brace Yourself Games, a prominent indie developer, was hosting their own game, Crypt of the Necrodancer,

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and they had over 100 viewers playing at the same exact time. And this was using TRBot.

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So, this is the type of game that's like called a "roguelike", so...

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if your character dies then it's permanent death, and you basically have a better chance at progressing farther the next time.

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And so, this was during the height of the COVID pandemic, so this was something that players can look forward to -

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really look forward to because they can't visit - they weren't able to visit family; most of them weren't.

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So they're stuck at home you know, something they can just play around with and look forward to.

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And I would tune in every now and then and I'd the same players come on. They'd say "Hey, did we get past so and so?",

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"How far did we get?", and sometimes be like "Wow! we got this far!" so...

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you know, something for people to look forward to, and just overall everyone had a great time with it.

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And here's the impact on a charity called Extra-Life.

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Extra-Life raises money for children in local hospitals across the United States and Canada.

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I collaborated with another stream called TwitchPlays_ZeldaGames. We had a cross-community Zelda: Ocarina of Time 100% Charity Race.

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What do I mean by that? So...even though TwitchPlays_ZeldaGames was using their own software, I was using TRBot,

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and that enabled us to basically have a race. So we both started the game at the same exact time, and then two separate streams,

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my stream and theirs, would be competing to see who can complete the game first, collecting every single item.

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And so...we had quite ambitious goals, but overall we ended up raising over $700, which was far more than we expected.

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And umm...we chose the 100% category in particular because it'd allow more time for donations

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and there are more difficult challenges involved. So, if uh...say people are having trouble and someone else donated some money,

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that would definitely motivate them to, you know, keep going and push harder, and take things further.

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Overall, it was just a really great event, and I had a lot of fun.

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Here's the impact on the speedrun community.

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So, just for those unaware, speedruns are basically completing games-involve completing games as quickly as possible, and there are whole communities around this.

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Pictured is the game Metal Gear Solid, a 1998 video game for the original PlayStation.

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This is a Twitter post, viewed on the free Nitter client, of a brand new discovery in this game.

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And it's quite old: it's fairly popular to speedrunners; they know mostly every trick in the book, but this was something brand new to them.

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And it's a single player game, and they found that the guards at the end of the game can be controlled with the second controller, which is something

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completely off-the-wall, that no one would really ever check...

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especially on a single player game such as this one.

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And so, TwitchPlaysSpeedruns, who is a prominent TRBot user, was hosting this game, and they accidentally misconfigured their inputs.

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So they had everything that TRBot would input on controller port one to also happen on controller port 2.

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And this is just like...when they were aiming around with the character, they found the guards were also moving,

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and this is just like something completely off-the-wall that would only be possible in this sort of circumstance with TRBot.

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And then here's an example of the community-building that I touched on earlier.

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So, on the leftmost screenshot, there's a user named "dragonc0".

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They say they know the system quite well and they played a lot on a different channel.

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And there are newer players here playing this game, and they're trying to complete some challenge. They're trying to...trying to beat the game, essentially.

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I believe dragonc0 came from TwitchPlaysSpeedruns, and then this is on my stream.

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Basically, you can see the teacher-student dynamic here in a way.

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dragonc0 is like asking if they can try, giving some slight advice. And overall they're having a great time.

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You know, a more experienced player is coming in, helping them learn how to play, and they're also staying more engaged -

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they're also enjoying themselves. And together, they feel they accomplished something.

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And then, this is possible because TRBot is free software.

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I was hosting it on my stream, sure, but TwitchPlaysSpeedruns can host it on their stream because there's no restrictions on using TRBot.

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And then dragonc0 is able to jump from TwitchPlaysSpeedruns to my stream because of that.

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So, future plans for TRBot.

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Right now it supports only joysticks and game controllers. I would really like to abstract it out farther

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to virtual devices beyond game controllers, such as keyboard, mouse, touchpad - ultimately allow playing more types of games.

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Right now it's possible to emulate keyboard and mouse inputs through free software such as AntiMicroX, which can remap game controller buttons to keyboard and mouse inputs.

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It works in certain cases, but it's not ideal. The input syntax is not catered to that at all, catered just to game controllers. It can be kinda clunky and suboptimal.

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Next is more support for free platforms. Matrix protocol would be excellent. Matrix is a pretty new protocol for real-time communication, and it's all decentralized.

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Having Matrix rooms, and maybe even entire Matrix servers dedicated to collaborative play would be a lot of fun.

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You can just hop back and forth between rooms and games that you enjoy.

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XMPP and BOSH support. So, this would allow running over XMPP...running TRBot over XMPP.

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Support particularly for two more platforms: Open Streaming Platform, which is a self-hosted platform for just game streaming.

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Its chat uses XMPP. And then also PeerTube chat, which is a peer-to-peer decentralized video hosting platform that has streaming support.

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They have a third-party chat extension that can be connected over XMPP/BOSH.

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And then further performance improvements, including how repetitive inputs are handled. Right now, it expands everything out to a gigantic string.

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So for instance if you had "[a100ms]*10", that would literally create a string that's "a100ms" 10 times.

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This provides quite a load on the parser, especially for longer inputs. I would like to be able to offload this to the input handler.

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It'd have the same result; maybe a marker for where the input starts-where the repetition starts and where it ends.

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This would have the same result of it repeating it a certain number of times, but the parser would finish much more quickly, and this wouldn't be a bottleneck.

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And lastly, how can you help? Well, you can host a collaborative play stream of your favorite free software game.

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This would be great for spreading free software games and also spreading collaborative play.

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And it'd just be a great way to play your favorite games in a new light.

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Code contributions; the repository is below, hosted on codeberg (https://codeberg.org/kimimaru/TRBot).

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I accept PRs, issues - if you want to change anything yourself, fork it, do what you want with it.

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And then creating packages for GNU/Linux distros, maybe even ports for BSD.

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I believe the latest version, TRBot 2.5.1, added support for a system-wide install, so it can be used over apt...you can create an apt package of it, for instance.

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And then spreading the word. I mentioned earlier: collaborative play can be very fun, and it can be a unique way, a unique take, on your favorite games.

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I recommend everyone to try it, especially in like the closer, community-oriented ways of play.

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Maybe something more hectic like TwitchPlaysPokemon may not be your style, but feel free to try it regardless.

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And...thank you! I have time for Q & A.

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Thank you Thomas for the excellent talk. It was very cool. It's an excellent project, super cool, with I think a lot of possibilities.

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And especially like things like adding IRC support and having automated tests with CI to increase the overall quality of the codebase,

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adding support for GNU/Linux of course.

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And also happy to hear - or see - that you went with the AGPLv3 strong copyleft license,

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and I also very much appreciated the community-building aspects and impacts of it - I think that's super cool.

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Thank you.

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Cheers, thank you!

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So, with that, we are opening the floor to questions. So, folks if you do have questions, please paste them on IRC. Ideally, tag my nick, "bandeli", there, so I could relay them.

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Okay, I see we have one question already by Michael, which I'll paste here as well.

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But Michael is asking: "Are there other uses of TRBot beyond collaborative play? Could there be a machine learning application of this software of some sort?"

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Yeah, so there are two questions here, so I'll address the first one: "Are there other uses of TRBot beyond collaborative play"?

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You could use it for your own uses. So, for instance, if you have to like mash a button in a video game, you can set up TRBot and then mash super quickly,

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more quickly than you could, and just automate that.

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You could also automate other things like grinding in an RPG. It might take some effort to create macros for that, but that's possible.

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Could there be machine learning applications of the software? Admittingly, I don't have too much knowledge on machine learning, but

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I think that it could be possible to use TRBot to play games entirely through machine learning.

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It has all the capabilities of playing the games, so now you need to teach it how to do that.

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Very cool!

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Umm, so I guess while we wait for more questions from the audience, I do have a question of my own.

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So if I understand correctly, TRBot uses a DSL with a custom parser, right?

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Yeah, the parser is all custom using regular expressions.

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Right, cool. Yeah, so I guess my main question I was wondering...

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so while this language - input language - seems very terse and efficient and purposely designed I guess for TRBot.

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And for this kind of use, I was wondering, for example, if you considered maybe supporting some kind of an API with

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an actual like complete programming language perhaps, like Scheme or Lua, that I think tend to lend themselves nicely to, I guess, scripting or embedded use-case.

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No, I haven't considered that, and admittingly I'm not very familiar with Scheme or Lua, but that sounds like an excellent idea. It's definitely something to consider.

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Awesome, cool. Yeah, I think it would be an interesting addition to be able to fully, like, script and automate things with a complete programming language.

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It could add an interesting - or open a bunch of interesting avenues I guess.

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Mmhmm, yeah definitely.

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Umm, let's see...Alex asks: "What are some popular channels that use TRBot?"

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Popular channels...so, I don't keep tabs on every channel that uses it.

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There are...there's Brace Yourself Games, which hosted the Crypt of the NecroDancer run.

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TwitchPlaysSpeedruns has been growing. They use TRBot for many games. They've been more recently using it for, like, more modern games.

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There was a popular Russian streamer called "flashKO", I think there's a one in there - "f1ashKO" -

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has used it for like little breaks every now and then on the stream and played some older games.

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Aside from that, I am not very aware of all the streams using it, especially popular ones.

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It's really hard to get into streaming, you know, like there are so many channels and so on, but like not too many big players there.

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Right.

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Okay, so we have about two and a half more minutes for questions, so folks, if you do have more questions, feel free to keep them coming.

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So I guess a question of my own. I think you might've mentioned this in the beginning and I missed it. What is the implementation language of TRBot? Is it C#, or...?

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Oh yes, TRBot is written in C# using the .NET 5 SDK, both of which are free software under the MIT license.

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Okay, gotcha - cool!

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Umm, oh yes, I see one question here that I missed.

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Afdahl asks: "Is PeerTube plugin live chat the 3rd party extension that you were referencing?"

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Uhh, yes, that's the one. I believe that is the XMPP/BOSH.

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Awesome!

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I see another question, also from Afdahl:

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"How would you compare non-text direct control, especially mouse pointer control, in this, to controlling games with remote desktop control systems?"

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Non-text direct control with the mouse pointer...controlling games with...direct desktop control?

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Umm, I guess I'm not sure what it means by "direct desktop control systems"? So...

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I guess I'm not sure what that means - what "direct desktop control systems" are.

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Okay, no worries. Yeah, if the question isn't completely clear, perhaps Afdahl could clarify further.

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And I think we're approaching the end of our Q & A time period in like 20 seconds.

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Umm...so I guess we can go ahead and slowly wrap up.

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And, yeah, it'd be great, for example, if you could hang out on IRC after your talk, and perhaps, take some more questions there.

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Yeah, definitely!

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Okay, great. Thanks again, Thomas, for the great talk!

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Thank you Amin, it was a pleasure. Take care!

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* Music *

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Thank you, you too!

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Bye!

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Bye - see you around!