For almost four years, enhancing the player experience on my Digital Combat Simulator (DCS) server has been a personal passion. I wanted to give players real-time insights into the server’s current mission, mission time to gauge day/night cycles, and even a live view of who’s soaring through the skies – all without needing to launch DCS itself. This led me down the path of creating a Discord Bot Server, a solution to bridge the gap between the game server and our community platform.
Initially, I built a bot using Node.JS and Discord.IO. While functional, it wasn’t the most streamlined approach. Each server owner would have to undertake the task of creating and hosting their own individual Discord bot.
Ideally, Eagle Dynamics (ED), the developers of DCS, would implement an official Discord bot. Given that all the necessary server data is inherently available within DCS, a centralized, official bot seems like the most logical and efficient solution. A single, robust bot would eliminate the need for server owners to manage and host their own, simplifying the process of connecting their DCS server to their community Discord.
I even raised a ticket with ED about three years ago, suggesting this very idea. Unfortunately, it didn’t gain traction at the time.
Undeterred, I continued refining my personal bot, expanding its capabilities to share even more valuable information, such as the server password and details about the Simple Radio Standalone (SRS) version and parameters. However, accessing some of this data directly from an ED-hosted server might be restricted, although I could be mistaken.
A significant challenge arose when the Discord.IO framework reached its end-of-life. This necessitated a partial rewrite of the bot’s code. Despite this setback, the bot remained operational, and its continued functionality allowed me to postpone a complete overhaul for quite some time.
During this period, I explored other existing Discord bots designed for DCS, such as Custodian (https://github.com/DCS-gRPC/Custodian) and DCSServerBot (https://github.com/Special-K-s-Flightsim-Bots/DCSServerBot). While impressive, these bots were built using different programming languages (mine was initially in NodeJS) and didn’t perfectly align with the specific functional goals I had in mind. My focus wasn’t on extensive server management; instead, I aimed to foster richer “social” interactions between the DCS server environment and the Discord community.
Over the past few months, I undertook a complete rebuild of the bot, migrating it from the deprecated Discord.IO to the actively supported Discord.js library. I also revamped the Lua scripting component, ensuring a more robust and future-proof foundation.
The result is a significantly enhanced bot, now christened DIGITAL BOT SIMULATOR.
Digital Bot Simulator provides real-time server status updates, automatically notifying the Discord community when the DCS server goes offline. Furthermore, it creates a dedicated channel to broadcast in-mission events. As you can see, a wealth of information can be shared:
During intense dogfights, key events are captured and relayed to the Discord channel, keeping the community engaged with the action. Even unexpected incidents are reported:
Currently, the bot shares a comprehensive range of data. However, I plan to implement a user-friendly control panel with simple true/false toggles, empowering server administrators to customize precisely what information is shared on their Discord server, ensuring data privacy and relevance to their community.
Another exciting feature I’m actively developing is two-way chat integration between Discord and the in-game DCS chat. I had a functional prototype in the older bot version, which still works.
However, the previous technical implementation wasn’t as clean as I’d like. I’m exploring more elegant and efficient solutions to ensure seamless communication between Discord and DCS players.
To see Digital Bot Simulator in action, feel free to join my Discord server: https://discord.gg/ZUZdMzQ.
While still under active development, my goal is to make Digital Bot Simulator publicly available on GitHub. I plan to include a comprehensive guide to enable any DCS server administrator to easily download and deploy it on their own server, enhancing their community engagement. The release timeline is still to be determined.
If you have any questions or are interested in learning more about discord bot servers for DCS, please ask them publicly, either in the comments below or in a public channel on Discord. You can find me on the official DCS Discord server or the modding hub Discord server. Public questions are preferred as they allow the answers to benefit a wider audience.
See you in the skies!
Asta☠
