Quackthing

[DigitalDuck]

For the last couple of years I've been streaming with my right-hand bot, Quackthing. I created him initially as an IRC bot, then moved him over to Twitch and kept tacking on new features until he became an unmaintainable mess. An amazing mess, but a mess nonetheless.

Some of you might have seen Quackthing - I snuck him into a couple of Peter's streams so we could bet on races.

So I started again, this time writing him especially for Twitch, and decided that other people should be able to use him on their streams, with fully customisable commands. I can now say I've achieved this.

Because he's been re-written from scratch, he doesn't have all the features of the old Quackthing. At the moment only the core is implemented, with the ability to set personal settings, create triggers and custom commands, and some basic maths stuff too.

In the future I'll be adding a ton of new things; some the old Quackthing had (giveaways, number analysis, races, announcements, chat games, antispam features), and some that'll be new (custom auto-host, astronomy/calendar functions, and my take on an autodj system).

For now, you can help by bringing Quackthing into your channel (go to twitch.tv/quackthing and type 'qt join') and experiment with him. Let me know what you think, any problems you have, and any suggestions you have for features. Full documentation is available by typing 'qt help', or following this link.

Disclaimer: Quackthing is currently in-development and so may not be 100% stable. Furthermore, he's running on my home computer which means he could go offline without warning.

 

[DigitalDuck]

I've updated Quackthing to v0.2. He's now capable of handling custom variables, giveaways, basic number analysis, and races. I've also made general improvements to his stability and fixed a few bugs.

 

[DigitalDuck]

Quackthing v0.3 arrives! Aubergine Imbolc brings custom functions, auto-host, announcements, advanced number analysis, and the Catnip chat game.

Twitch has various features that allow you to host others on your channel, including an autohost feature, in which you select a pre-approved set of channels to add to your autohost list, and then have them chosen either in priority order or at random. Twitch will pick one (if none are online, Twitch will pick the first one to come online) and host it until it goes offline again.

This is good, but limited. What if there’s a channel you like so much you want to stop whoever you’re hosting to host them? What if you like a streamer, but only when they’re playing a certain game? What if you don’t care about who’s streaming at all, as long as it’s a game you like?

Quackthing’s autohost allows you to do all this, and more! It works by assigning a score to various conditions and hosting the highest-scoring streamer. Things considered include:

• preferred channels
• preferred games
• preferred channel/game pairs
• userlevels in the host’s channel
• whether they have Quackthing on their channel
• whether Quackthing has ever seen them before
• viewer count

Quackthing won’t autohost while you’re streaming, and if you manually host someone he’ll honour your choice and wait for that stream to finish before resuming autohost.

So you can set up your channel to automatically host anyone playing Shenmue and give priority to some streamers over others (like the Shenmuedojo channel, or a certain duck...)

This is early days for the feature, so stability isn't guaranteed, and you will need to add Quackthing as an editor of your channel (otherwise he can't host people).

 

[Mittens2317]

It’s adorable that you refer to it as “him”.

 

[Araviel]

Sorry, just had to. All that quacking.

Nice job, tho!

 

[Jigen]

I can probably do some beta tests if I setup a stream environment for Shenmue.

 

[DigitalDuck]

Quackthing v0.4 is ready at last. Navy Ostara carries on its back whisper support, reminders, image analysis, and the Mindnumber chat game.

Along with reminders comes datetime functionality - including all the necessary handling of timezones and ability to create countdowns to a certain date. I know which date I'll be counting down to...

It’s adorable that you refer to it as “him”.

He's been with me for a while, and I've imbued him with a personality, so of course I anthropomorphise the bot.

I can probably do some beta tests if I setup a stream environment for Shenmue.

All you need to do is say 'qt join' in a channel he's in, and he'll join your channel. Even if you don't stream, you can use him to handle autohosting on your channel.

 

[DigitalDuck]

I've updated Quackthing to v0.5. Teal Beltaine adds command importing, keyword filters, astronomical coordinate conversions, and the Hangman chat game.

Command importing means you don't need to be able to do anything complicated yourself - if any other channel has a command of any type (in Quackthing, of course) you can simply have it copied to your own channel and start using it straight away.

 

[DigitalDuck]

Quackthing v0.6 arrives! Leaf Litha brings adding commands via Pastebin, antispam features, solar calculations, and the Prognumber chat game.

Prognumber is too addictive - this release was actually delayed because I was playing it too much. It's a single player version of Mindnumber; you're given a target and a set of numbers, and have to use the set of numbers to reach the target using various arithmetic operations.