It absolutely will. Watch this space. 😊
In fact... about two weeks? There will be news!
Elissa Black
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Sorry! It's really not designed for that. It's very much designed for people who already have a dedicated tilde club (or want to play it single player).
There are people linking it up with existing BBS software such as Synchronet so I'm sure there'll be instructions for that in future, but that still won't be a beginner's guide...
It's a pretty involved process, unfortunately, doing BBS setup stuff. I've created a sysop documentation though, so hopefully that helps! https://swordsoffreeport.com/md.html?src=sysop.md
Unfortunately that's not a trivial thing to do, or I'd probably have done it already. When I re-write the way the text code works I'll be doing term size and pause breaks, but for now that's a little ways off.
Please let me know what the segfaults show though, if you can! I just re-tested --force-alias does have a bug I found and fixed, but... it doesn't cause a crash? I will put up version 1.0.3 today with that fix (and a few others). If that still causes issues, please let me know!
Oh and for support things feel free to email me - the link is on the web site. Easier for sending crash dumps, info about the server setup, etc.
Thanks, and awesome! 😊
1 & 2 are already there, as of the latest version, thanks to another sysop who messaged me. We ended up settling on the option to run the game with --force-alias.
You can turn on or off forced password entry too, if you STILL want that. (A useful feature if, say, people still get command-line access - you may not want someone with terminal access realising they can log in as another user as they please.)
More details are in the sysop's guide.
If there's any issues with them, please let me know!
(3) is on my to-do list. Right now you can manually set a wide screen width for word wrapping, but it doesn't grab your screen dimensions from termcap yet as I found it... didn't work on a lot of systems. (And of course text ANYTHING barely works on Windows but... this is one of the few games where I guess Windows is by default a second-class citizen.)
I did set one up, but only as a test server as I don't want to have to moderate one myself atop of develop this. Just don't have time as long as this is a side project.
The web site has information about how to do it - including a link to the sysop documentation - which can also be found in the 'errata' directory in any copy of the game. Note that it requires some understanding of how to set up and run a unix server.
So, it began as an "I really want a BBS Door like those I played in the '90s for my little tilde club for my friends. Play once a day, see progress and have social message boards..." type idea in my head. Many months, 23,000 lines of code and 49,000 written words later, and Swords of Freeport 1.0 is done out!
A dozen or more people helped me test this almost daily, figuring out the right directions to go, steering me around bugs, and it's finally done!
It's a sort of steampunk fantasy setting, with a sense of humour and angry left-wing politics wherever I could sneak them in. You can make characters who are hunters, forgagers, pick pockets, burglars, fishers, and even work up to owning your own property & running a shop.
On top of being a text-mode RPG that can be played single player or multiplayer on a tilde club instance, it's also something I was able to get working on basically anything that can compile C++17 and has a few meg of memory.
It is (so far) working on macOS, Windows, and Linux - the latter with builds available for x86_64, and arm32 & arm64, so it'll run on even the oldest of raspberry pis (or similar ARM based single board computers).
I've got big plans for where to go with it, and am already planning version 1.1's features.
https://expectproblems.itch.io/swords-of-freeport