By
@aamosm
Made to bring forth my procedural generation algorithm that creates aliens into your own slack channel. to fight and play around. based on myuu. the pokemon discord bot
@aamosm
on
This Alien Does Not Exist - BOT
got nullo running on my nest server. pulled the repo straight from github, installed everything it needed (including chromium for image generation), configured the slack tokens and set it up as a systemd service.
it’s now running independently of my computer, with automatic startup and restarts. no more having to keep my own machine on for the bot.
also moved image delivery to slack’s native image blocks so portraits can be embedded directly in messages.
nullo is live!
@aamosm
on
This Alien Does Not Exist - BOT
15m 32s logged
got my Nest account approved! finally have an actual server to host Nullo on.
the default allocation is 2GB RAM, 2 CPU cores and 16GB storage. this means i can run the bot independently instead of having to keep my computer on. Nest also gives me SSH key and domain management through its dashboard.
the plan is to pull Nullo directly from GitHub, install its dependencies (including Chromium for portrait generation), configure the Slack tokens and run it through systemd. that should keep it running 24/7, with automatic restarts.
also updated the image delivery to use Slack’s native image blocks rather than relying on the previous upload flow. need to test that properly once the bot is deployed.
next up: getting Nullo online.
@aamosm
on
This Alien Does Not Exist - BOT
17m 32s logged
well. the aliens are getting a slack bot.
i’ve started working on a bot to bring my procedural alien generation algorithm into Slack. the idea is to let people generate aliens directly in their channels, see what they’ve created and make them fight each other.
it’s inspired by Myuu, the pokemon discord bot. except instead of pokemon, we have whatever the hell my generator decides to produce.
rather than recreating the generator inside the bot, i’m using the website that’s already running.
Nullo uses Node.js, Slack Bolt and Playwright. it opens the deployed website in a headless Chromium browser, calls its existing JavaScript API and captures the rendered alien from the canvas.
the bot then sends the image and the corresponding information back into Slack.
so the website does the actual generation, rendering and combat. Nullo is essentially the interface between that and Slack. no duplicated generator, no separate deployment of the website’s API.
following the guide was ridiculously easy.
like. suspiciously easy.
got the project set up, installed the dependencies, connected Playwright to the website and got the files running with npm start.
the guide did spoon-feed us a little too much with all the copy-pastable code. could’ve let us figure out a few things ourselves. 😭
anyway, the actual setup went smoothly.
well.
i got the bot installed in my workspace and tried running the commands. first attempt wasn’t exactly successful.
the /nullo-ping command wasn’t registered in the original handler, and the error handling wasn’t particularly useful either. instead of telling me what actually went wrong, it just returned a generic error.
so i’ve been fixing the command handlers and improving the diagnostics.
still working on getting the complete thing running properly.
the next step is moving it to Hack Club Nest so the bot can stay online without having my laptop running all the time.
more aliens. now in Slack.
👽
hehehe, you arent getting my apis
