The Console tab is where you follow a bot minute by minute. It puts three sources in one timeline, ordered by time: what Asterobot does with the bot, what the bot's script writes, and the game chat. Your first bot turns on the chat for the first time; this page covers the rest.
What the console shows
| Source | Lines |
|---|---|
| Asterobot | What Asterobot does with the bot: connecting, changes of state, errors. For example Relaying a game session when a MITM bot picks up your game. |
| Script | What the bot's script writes with botDebug(), botInfo(), botWarn() and botError(). |
| Chat | The game chat the bot receives, while Live chat is on. |
Every line starts with the time of day, in your browser's time zone. Asterobot and script lines then show their level, DEBUG, INFO, WARN or ERROR, and their text. Chat lines show the speaker's character name, then what they said.
A script can also write with asterobot:console. Those lines don't appear here: they go to Server > Console, without saying which bot wrote them. See Status and console, and, for script authors, Logging and debugging.
What's kept
Asterobot keeps the last 200 Asterobot and script lines of each bot. When you open the tab, the console starts with those lines, then new ones arrive as they happen. Asterobot keeps them in memory only, so they're gone after it restarts. Asteroboard shows up to 500 lines per bot while it stays open.
Chat is different: Asterobot keeps none of it. Asteroboard collects chat lines while it's open, as long as Live chat is on, and loses them when you reload or close it. They also come from the same place as the messages of the Network tool's Traffic panel, which has three consequences:
- While Pause is on in Traffic, chat lines stop arriving in the console too.
- Clear in Traffic also removes the chat lines from the console.
- Once that panel holds about 2,000 messages for the bot, the oldest ones go, and their chat lines with them.
See Network traffic.
Live chat
The Live chat switch, at the top right, turns the game chat on for this bot. It's the same setting as the ChatChannelMessageEvent message in the Network tool's Settings: turning one on turns the other on. The choice is saved with the bot, so it stays as you left it after a restart, and everyone who opens this bot sees the same.
Only chat that arrives while the switch is on shows up: messages from before don't appear afterwards.
The switch only changes what Asteroboard shows. A script receives the chat whether it's on or not.
Filter and search
- Sources chooses which sources are shown: tick or untick Asterobot, Script and Chat. When a script writes a lot, keeping only Script makes it easier to follow.
- Filter keeps the lines that contain what you type, ignoring upper and lower case. For a chat line, it looks at both the speaker and the message. The cross in the box clears it.
While anything is hidden, the top of the console shows how many lines you see out of how many, such as 12 of 340. When nothing matches, the console says "Nothing matches the filter." An empty console says "No log messages yet."
Copy
The copy button, Copy what's shown, copies the lines you see as text, one per line, such as 14:03:12 [info] Relaying a game session or 14:05:40 Sender-Name: hello. A notification confirms how many lines were copied.
Follow the newest lines
While you're at the bottom, the console scrolls down with each new line. Scroll up to read something, and it stops following so the lines don't move under your eyes. A Follow button then appears at the bottom right: click it to jump back to the newest line and follow again.
The dot next to the bot's name, at the top left, pulses green while Asteroboard is connected to Asterobot. If the connection drops and comes back while the tab is open, the console loads the kept lines again.
Send a chat message
The box at the bottom of the console sends a message in the game chat.
Warning
This really sends the message in the game, as your character, on the general channel (GLOBAL), where the players around your character can read it.
- Type your message in "Say something in the game chat...".
- Press Enter, or click the send button next to the box.
The box empties once the message has gone out. It can only use the general channel. To talk on another channel, send ChatChannelMessageRequest from the Network tool and set its channel field: see Send messages by hand.
The bot must be connected to a game. If the message can't be sent, the alert Couldn't send the message appears above the lines with the reason, such as bot has no game connection: "my-bot".