IRC Game: Scramble

Abstract:

Scramble is an IRC game. It’s a pretty simple word game written in JAVA. But I can bet, my Scramble is not as simple as many other TCL scripts written as plug-in for IRC BOTs.

Limitation brings Motivation

Being one of the administrators of NSUers I always had the inspiration to do `something new` for NSUers. NSUers IRC server has been running since 2005; our limitations were like:

• We were able to run only one IRC BOT, Eggdrop, due to number of running process limitation
• We could load IRC games as Eggdrop plug-ins; but too many plug-ins for one process would put pressure for Oracle, our Eggy
• Even though these third party plug-ins were open source projects, merging game statistics with NSUers user database would be tough enough as most of these scripts maintain statistics locally in an individual text file; I was much interested in maintaining Live NSUers ID and global user statistics

Considering these facts I made up my mind to write few block of codes so that I can

• run it from my own machine
• draw the features the way I want
• expand the features time to time.

Implementation

Scramble has been written in Java; why Java? ‘caz I love it!

I could implement an IRC Bot Framework like pirc-bot; but uhh may be I’m too lazy to explore pirc plug-in structure. Nah! That’s not the point… I love raw coding stuffs!

Features

• Supports vBulletin account authentication.
• User statistics can be stored in and loaded from remote MySQL database through XMLRPC.
• Supports data cache procedure which ensures data stability
• An included external tool parses a text file, enriches word data file. Each new word is verified through a data dictionary webservice

Screenshots

Screenshot: Scramble is running in console.

Screenshot: Clients playing Scramble in irc.nsuers.com