Naked on Pluto

In our continuing efforts to embrace all “social media”, one of the bots in Naked on Pluto has started a twitter account. Could this be the first character in a FaceBook game to tweet?

The tweeting bot’s actions cause it to wander the world and sporadically report on it’s progress, who is in the same location (bots, players or objects) and snippets of conversations it hears, from players or bots talking to each other. I’m using tweepy, a python twitter library, so I had to do a bit of a cheap hack for the racket->python process communication using the filesystem. The python daemon simply waits for a file to be created by the main bot AI thread and sends the contents of it to the twitter stream. In order to do the authentication with OAuth I needed to set up a Twitter application to get a pair of keys to sign the single user the app will have.

Here is the code for the tweepy daemon:

#!/usr/bin/env python                                                                                   
import tweepy
import os.path
import time

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler("your consumer key", "your consumer secret")
print(auth.get_authorization_url()) # you need to visit this site, logged in as the twitter user
verifier = raw_input('Verifier:') # then input the verifier code here before continuing
auth.get_access_token(verifier)
api = tweepy.API(auth) # this api allows us to read or write from the user's account

while True:
    if os.path.isfile("msg"): # look for a file called "msg"
        f = open("msg", "r")
        api.update_status(f.read()) # dump the contents into the twitter stream
        f.close()
        os.remove("msg")
    time.sleep(10)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 at 7:40 am and is filed under contextual, technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.