February 2019 Update Notes

Music, cats, Tic Tac Toe and more!

Hi everyone, Pedro here! Welcome to the first update of the year! December was a pretty quiet month for us, as everyone was celebrating with their families or just taking a break. It’s been some time since we’ve last pushed updates to the bot, and we’ve been working hard behind the curtains to add lots of features. In this update, the team focused on music features, but that’s far from the only thing we’ve done. Hope you like what we’ve prepared!

I’m also experimenting with a new and more complete format for these posts. From now on, I’ll try to give more details about what’s new instead of just using topics. If you feel like that’s too long for you, don’t worry! There’s a TL;DR on Twitter.

Commands

s!lolstatus

You can now check the status of the League of Legends server you play in by using s!lolstatus <server> . Works with na, euw, eune, lan, las, br, tr, ru, oce, jp and kr . Bladey will display the messages in your server’s configured language if the region provides translations (like eune and euw). When the preferred language is not available, the region’s default language is used.

s!lolstatus displays the messages in Czech after setting the server language to it

s!pusheen

Pusheen the cat, in your Discord server! By running s!pusheen, you’ll get a random image from the pusheen Tumblr blog. ISN’T SHE CUTE?

s!presidentialalert

Remember the test Presidential Alert that went off in the United States last October? Yeah, we’ve made a command for that too. You can now be Trump and send shitty alerts as well.

This command is useless, I know. Sorry.

s!support

In case you ever need quick support, just type s!support and you’ll get an invite link for our support server. Easy, isn’t it?

s!lastfm

This is a pretty powerful one, it lets you search for users, tracks, albums and artists on last.fm. You’ll have to specify what you’re looking for, so it’ll be s!lastfm artist, s!lastfm album or s!lastfm track, depending on what you want to get. Also, as many of you complained that just throwing the first search result at your face wasn’t that good, this command gives you the top 10 results and lets you choose one by sending its number.

s!time

s!time has been rewritten, and you don’t have to type in an iana tz database timezone code anymore. Just type the city name, and Switchblade does its magic automatically.

s!spotify

The Spotify command got a complete overhaul, and now, just like s!lastfm, lets you search for albums, tracks, artists, playlists and users, giving you the first 10 results to choose from.

s!twitch

This one lets you quickly look up a Twitch user directly from within your Discord chat. If the user is streaming, it will also show a thumbnail, the title, game, and viewer count for the stream.

s!tictactoe

Yup, you read it right. You can now challenge your friends to an exciting game of Tic Tac Toe by using s!tictactoe (s!ttt for short). You can also add --text to the end of the message to use a nice text-based board!

s!roleinfo

Pretty simple one, allows you to get information about a role by using s!roleinfo. You can use a mention, ID, or even the role name to select what role you want to get information about.

s!uigradient

Any designers around here? This one integrates with a really nice website that I use a lot, uiGradients. It gives you a random gradient from the website, along with the color information you need to use it in photoshop or anywhere you wish.

Music

SoundCloud Search Support

We already support SoundCloud links, but now you can search directly from the bot’s s!play command. Just add --soundcloud to the end of your search query and let the magic happen.

It’s playing it from SoundCloud, trust me.

More Music Nodes

We have added two more music (Lavalink) nodes around the globe to better serve whom has their server region set to somewhere farther away from Brazil. The new nodes are located in Frankfurt and San Francisco, and Switchblade will automatically select which one to use depending on your voice region. From now on, the São Paulo node will only serve Brazil.

Deezer Support

Your complaints were heard, and you can finally play Deezer links with s!play! There’s support for albums, playlists and individual songs.

What other music streaming services should we support? Please let us know on our support server which one you use!

Better Lyrics Command

s!lyrics was already an awesome command for quickly finding your favorite song’s lyrics, but we’ve made it better! Now, if you’re using Switchblade to listen to a song, you don’t even have to type it’s name for the lyrics command to find it, everything is done automagically!

Better Queue Controls

Our music system is already quite powerful, but the queue system is not that good yet. To make up for that, we’ve added some new queue control commands! Here’s what’s new:

• s!queue clear allows you to remove everything from the queue without stopping the playback.
• s!queue shuffle shuffles the current queue — awesome if you tend to use big playlists from YouTube or Spotify and are bored of the first songs you hear over and over.
• s!queue jump <index> jumps to a specific song in the queue. BE CAREFUL, as everything before that song will be removed from the queue.
• s!queue remove <number> lets you remove a specific song from the queue without affecting anything else. Good if you add 10 hours of ayaya to your queue accidentally.

Seeking

You can now seek for a specific moment on a song by using s!seek. It’s pretty simple, just type in the timecode you want to go to, and press enter! You can also use + and - for relative timecodes.

BASS BOOST!

It’s good for you, bad for you ears, and it’s finally a thing on Switchblade! Just type s!bassboost and enjoy the low quality audio with lots of b a s s. To disable the Bass Boost mode, just type s!bassboost again.

New Host

Since day one, we’ve been using Heroku’s free tier to host Switchblade — it allowed us to kickstart the bot at no cost, and was serving us pretty well. But there’s a small problem: Heroku tends to get expensive as you scale, and is kind of limited resource-wise. For these reasons and many others, we’re moving to our own server, which will allow us to keep improving the bot with a lot more freedom.

Minor Changes and Fixes

• s!beatsaver has been fixed and is now working again. Yay!
• The owoified text in s!owoify is now the embed’s description instead of the title.
• Your s!dicksize— which was previously randomly generated— is now based on your internal Discord ID, so it won’t change anymore. We’ve also added a graphic representation of it’s size.
• s!botinfo now shows the number of users the bot knows.
• We’ve added thousand separators in many places around the bot. They’ll change according to your server’s configured language.
• Fixed a bug where the bot would respond to any special character as a prefix.
• Changed the error text s!volume shows when the bot isn’t playing anything.
• Fixed a bug that wouldn’t let you queue songs if the bot was on a channel it shouldn’t be able to join.
• Fixed playback for private SoundCloud tracks.
• Removed command usage text from some error messages that didn’t really need it.
• Fixed an error that didn’t let the bot find some songs from Spotify.
• Got s!birb working again. It now pulls images from r/birbs.
• Minor text fixes.

The future

You should hear a lot about the dashboard in the coming months. With the new host, we’re now able to connect Switchblade directly to the website, and that will help us bring the dashboard to life. After that is up and running, our main focus will be moderation, so you should expect extremely powerful and customizable stuff. We’ll also keep improving the music system, with new queue control commands and more supported streaming services. We hope you’re as excited as us!

That’s it for today, folks. We’ve been working super hard on these features, and would love to hear any kind of feedback from you. See ya!