Interpreting Announcements

During the game, you've likely noticed announcements appearing in your terminal. These announcements are the game's way of communicating important events to players. However, these messages can sometimes seem cryptic or you might find yourself checking your inbox frequently for further details.

Wouldn't it be convenient to access this information directly from your terminal? Well, there's a way to do that!

By using handlers, you can create an autonomous agent to retrieve this information for you, marking the progression from simple bots to entities capable of interpreting and acting on game events directly.

Setting up the Development Environment

Start by creating a new file named bot.lua in your preferred directory.

Ideally, this file should be placed in the same directory where your player process runs to ease the loading of the code. Else, you'll need to use relative paths to access the file.

Writing the Code

Let's dive into the logic.

Each handler in aos requires three key pieces of information:

• name: A unique name for the handler
• pattern: A pattern for the handler to identify, triggering its operation
• handle: The operations to perform when the desired pattern is found.

Here's how you can write a handler for printing announcement details:

-- Handler to print game announcements directly in the terminal.
Handlers.add(
  "PrintAnnouncements",
  Handlers.utils.hasMatchingTag("Action", "Announcement"),
  function (msg)
    print(msg.Event .. ": " .. msg.Data)
  end
)

In this case, the name of the handler is "PrintAnnouncements". It uses a special in-built utility (hasMatchingTags) to check if the incoming message has been tagged as an announcement. If true, the handler prints the Event and Data, which represent the title and description of the announcement.

Note: Once a message is "handled", it will be discarded from your Inbox.

Loading and Testing

Now, let's bring this to life in the game.

Navigate to your aos player terminal and enter a game session.

Activate the handler by loading your bot.lua file with:

.load bot.lua

You'll now see game announcements appear directly in your terminal, offering real-time insights without the need to sift through your inbox.

Congratulations! You have just taken the first step in building a bot on aos. But let's keep working on adding more features to it 🌐