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Hack 67 Watch Online Games with MatchEd

Many online gamers use IRC to organize battles
and discuss tactics. MatchEd lets you watch the progress of a game
from the safety of IRC.

Online gaming is
becoming an increasingly popular form of recreational computing. With
the widespread introduction of broadband Internet connections for
home users, many more people are able to play these online games with
acceptable responsiveness. Counter-Strike is one such game and has
proven to be very popular among online communities. This team-based
game pitches terrorists against counterterrorists. Sets of players
often form themselves into clansgroups of people who play as a
team against other clans. Clan members may be geographically distant,
so IRC provides a suitable way of letting clans discuss their tactics
and plan future events.

While clan members are busy chatting away in their IRC channel, they
may find it useful to know what is going on while other people play
on their Counter-Strike server.

MatchEd is an IRC bot that lets you watch
the progress of a game of Counter-Strike, Action Half-Life, Natural
Selection, Fire Arms, Death Match Classic, or Front Line Force.
MatchEd is designed to be platform independent and can be run on any
platform that supports Java. MatchEd uses very little CPU time, which
makes it ideal for running on the same machine as the game server,
making it permanently available. See it monitoring a game of
Counter-Strike in Figure 10-4.

Figure 10-4. MatchEd reporting on a game of Counter-Strike

MatchEd works by reading the logs directed via the Half-Life server
logaddress command. To use this, you must have
rcon access to the server.

You can download MatchEd from http://www.deaded.com. To run it, you will
need to have a Java Runtime Environment installed.

10.5.1 Configuring MatchEd

Configuration of
MatchEd is
done in the
MatchEd.properties file. The following
information must be set.

IRCServer

The IRC server the bot will connect to (e.g., irc.quakenet.org).

BotName

The nickname the bot will use when connecting to the IRC server.

Channel

The channel the bot will join when it connects to the IRC server.

AdminPassword

The password to access the bot''s administrations
features.

RconAuthPassword

The password for the game server administrators to use. Note that
this is not the actual rcon password.

GameServerIP

The IP address of the game server to use for reporting.

GameServerPort

The port number of the game server to use for reporting.

10.5.2 Starting MatchEd

Let''s
assume the following
variables are set up in the
MatchEd.properties file:

BotName = MatchEd
AdminPassword = power
RconAuthPassword = fubar
- etc -

Most commands can be accessed only if you have been authorized as an
administrator of the bot. Authorization is carried out by sending a
private message to MatchEd:

/msg MatchEd auth power

If you want MatchEd to start reporting the progress of a game of
Counter-Strike, you will need to authenticate as an admin or rcon
administrator and tell the bot the rcon password for the
Counter-Strike server:

/msg MatchEd rcon_auth fubar
/msg MatchEd rcon_password real-rcon-password

The authenticated user is now able to tell MatchEd to start reporting
on the game of Counter-Strike by typing
!startcs in the channel.

A quick way of checking to see if everything is working properly is
to get MatchEd to say something to the Counter-Strike server. First,
type !serversayon in the channel. This causes
the bot to announce all server admin messages that are typed in the
game. You can get the bot to send a message to the game with the rcon
say command:

/msg MatchEd rcon say test

If everything worked successfully, you should see MatchEd respond
with the following:

<MatchEd> [SERVER]: "test"

From this point on, any activity in the server will be visible in the
IRC channel.

10.5.3 Message Styles

Most
aspects of MatchEd
can be customized, including its name and the rate that it sends the
messages to IRC. This can be useful to prevent the bot from being
killed for flooding the server. It is also possible to change the
style of the messages that are used to describe the events happening
in the game.

To change any of the message styles, you must edit the
MatchEd.properties file. As an example, the default
output when an rcon say message is displayed is set as the following:

CSServerSay = [SERVER]: ${sayMsg}

Note the variable ${sayMsg}, which contains the
actual message from the game server.

There are some other static variables that can be used to apply some
color to the style, such as $RED,
$BLUE, $GREEN, and so on. Each
time a color is applied, it will affect the rest of the message until
it is changed or turned off with the $NORMAL
variable. Other formatting, such as $BOLD,
$UNDERLINE, and $REVERSE are
complementary. Each of these styles can be turned off by repeating
the same variable or by using the $NORMAL
variable.

To make the rcon say message style stand out a bit more, you can add
color and boldness like this:

CSServerSay = $RED[SERVER ADMIN SAYS]$NORMAL: $BOLD${sayMsg}$NORMAL

10.5.3.1 Dynamic configuration

If you a
re authorized as an administrator,
reload the changes made to any of the game output sections in
MatchEd.properties while the bot is still
running. If you type !reload in the channel,
the bot will reload its configuration from the file. You can see
whether this has worked by telling the bot to send the test message
again. The bot should promptly return the following:

<MatchEd> [SERVER ADMIN SAYS]: "test"

The [SERVER ADMIN SAYS] text will be in red and
the actual say message, "test", will be shown in
bold in the normal text color.

Alex North