Hanabi Telegram Bot

This repo aims to allow one to play the Hanabi Game on a telegram bot.

There are 2 parts to this process

• A server that runs the actual game (the Game Server)
• A process that runs the telegram bot (the Telegram Client)

The point of this dual server approach is to separate the logic for running the game from the logic for handling the telegram bot, potentially allowing for cross platform games in the future.

Between the 2 different servers, we will use google's Protocol Buffers to communicate.

We will use tgbot-cpp as the telegram bot framework.

Dependencies

We require a compiler that supports C++23 (or at least C++20 for coroutines, but I did not try building with C++20). This project has only been tested with GNU GCC version 13.2.0.

We need to install tgbot-cpp as well as the C++ boost libary.

To speed up compilation, we use ccache and Ninja.

sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev ninja-build ccache

The Game Server

We spawn a new thread for each new client to allow the main thread to continue waiting on new connections. Threads that correspond to people joining lobbies will drop after they join a specific lobby. This means that the number of threads running at anytime roughly corresponds to the number of loading/active games. It might be better to use coroutines to deal with managing the various games, but that is a stretch goal.

The Telegram Client

The telegram client process acts as a middleman between individual telegram chats and the game server. Compared with the approach of spawning a new thread to handle each game in the server, I opted to use a single thread that operated several chat sessions and uses coroutines to manage the state of each chat session. This is more lightweight compared to spawning multiple threads since the work done for each chat session is quite minimal anyway. It is a future goal to utilise multithreading via a worker pool to scale this if necessary.

User Flow

1. The user will send any message to initiate the bot.
2. The bot will prompt the user for his/her name
3. The bot will prompt the user to do 1 of 3 actions
   • Create a new game
   • Join an existing game
   • Join a random game (create a new game if no games are available)
4. If the player is a leader, the bot will wait on the player to start the game. Otherwise, the player will wait for the leader to start the game.

Project Structure

• ./inc - Contains all the header (.h) files.
• ./src - Contains all the source (.cpp) files.
• ./proto - Contains all the protobuf (.proto) files.