Dev Update March 2020

Firstly I just want to take a moment to say from both myself and Rade that we hope you and your families are safe during this difficult time – remember to look after each other and your neighbours.
Not everyone is fortunate enough to have family close by and there are people who will be feeling more isolated now than ever.

With the bad out the way, this situation has given me and Rade the ability to spend more time working on PartyBeast.
So what have we been doing?

Testing Suite:

Right I can’t stress this enough – Rade has literally halved the amount of work I have to do for testing before pushing a release.

After seeing the frankly dizzying list of tasks I go through to test a candidate before release Rade built a whole testing rig.

This means that going forward we can commit code, mark a release, pull it locally and run the testing bot.
This should catch any snags I would usually find manually and greatly reduce the time between marking a release and go live.

Features:

Whilst you guys will only see the benefit of the above when we do releases what new toys will be coming in the near future:

1)%GAME% as an option for room name – It’s done. %GAME% will now take the users presence and add it to the room name. You should be aware there is NO filter on this so users can abuse it with a custom status. If the user isn’t playing a game or has no custom status it will fall back to just the word Game.

2)Some Room Name variables can now be used together – %USERNAME%, %NICKNAME%, %GAME% can all be used together to make dynamic room names. So you could have %USERNAME%’s %GAME% Room and it would show Krankie’s Rust Room.

3)%LIST% – Yes you can now have a list of room names which PartyBeast will use. This cannot be used in conjunction with other variables at this time. This is formatted as such: %LIST%First Room;Second Room;Third Room. PartyBeast will then split out the room names and choose one at random. it does NOT check for duplicates.

3)!pballow and !pbkick – In addition to !pblock you now have the ability to invite users and kick them from your channel if you’re the room owner. Simple!

4)Banned Words for !pbrename – We’ve implemented a badwords filter for !pbrename. It doesn’t do substrings so it will find “My Asshole” but not “MyAsshole”.

This can be turned on and off with !pbrename badwords

5)%INC% will now correctly order rooms – Previously %INC% would just dump new rooms at the bottom of the list so you’d end up with 1-2-3-5-4-6.

Now %INC% will find the increment that is missing and insert the room in the correct position.

We’ve also been working on some stuff behind the scenes which won’t make it into the next update but are laying the foundation for some bigger updates moving forward:

1)Config System Rewrite – We are currently rewriting the whole config system. One of my goals when I made PartyBeast was to not have lots of commands.
Currently in my opinion we’re failing in that regard and configuration is more difficult than it needs to be.
The new config system will be visual and reaction driven allowing you to type !pbconfig first to get a list of rooms (similar to !pbshowconfig and !pbroomname do now) followed by !pbconfig Room#.
This will then provide you with an embed showing you the current configuration for that room ie: how are room names displayed (!pbroomname), where will new channels be created (!pbparent), are the permissions correct (!pbchandebug).
You can then use the reactions attached to the embed to make changes.

2)Alert new room owner – We are looking at a way to make sure when an owner leaves a room the new owner knows who they are.
We looked at implementing a messaging system but when everyone bailed out a room it spam messaged everyone.
Moving forward we’re looking at setting a nickname with a emoji of some kind to show they’re the room owner.
We’d be interested to know your thoughts on this, our goal is to make it non obtrusive.

3)Localisation and general tidy up – Now we’ve gotten so big it’s getting to the point where PartyBeast is used in a large number communities where English isn’t the primary language.
This presents a problem because I am a luddite who can barely speak English let alone any other language.

With that said once the config system is done and we’ve generally tidied up the commands to be uniform we’ll be turning to you as our community to help us localize PartyBeast.

Wrap up:

I know a lot of you are excited for certain features and some of you have messaged me directly to discuss how you envision those working – Keep this up, I really enjoy hearing your ideas and it’s great to see people so passionate about something I made for fun and now get to work on with my friend.
If you’re one of those people and the thing we’ve discussed isn’t above don’t worry, I guarantee you it’s in on the list.
Having brought Rade on board one of the things it’s forced me to do was become more organised and transparent but with that has come the discovery that we have a bigger backlog of features and issues to clear than originally thought.

Stay Safe out there folks.