Thank you! My other stuff is non-interactive (and only one of the other stories is also set in the '90s), but I will hopefully do another interactive one some time.
So I spent some time looking at this during the week and unfortunately it's not doable without a lot of time. I put in a hacky version and it broke a lot of things. The project just wasn't designed with that in mind, and there are a lot of edge cases. It's designed to be a bit like a BBS door, not actually being one.
I'd have to totally re-write all the text display and word wrap features and even once it's done that'd take a lot of testing and debugging to find all the things it broke.
Part of me wants to write a framework that does all this and where the game logic then sits in a scripting language (it's probably obvious than 90% of this game is hard-coded in C++) but it's just not a project I have the motivation or time for right now. Apologies.
So, without access to /etc or the like, you can point environment variables called SFP_DATA and SFP_GAME to the two directories, to avoid that error message.
Then you just need the binary file to be in your path somewhere.
So, off the top of my head (and not knowing your OS) you probably want to have the 'sfp' binary file in any directory that's in your path, set in your .bash_profile or similar file.
Once it's in the path it should just find the binary fine, and with the two environment variables set above, it should find the correct game static and dynamic folders and run your instance.
I still have a rough sequel idea in my head, but haven't had the time to sit down and do it. I don't quite know how it ends yet, which doesn't help, either.
The other issue is that part of the original working (I think) is that the premise of "one night, find a person" fits the medium well. I need to find a similarly good conceit for the second one that doesn't feel too similar.
I haven't worked on any more SFP stuff yet, unfortunately. I've been inundated with other things taking up my time. It is still top of my list when I next sit down to work on it.
Ah yep, I follow you. I'll see what I can do. 😊 There is a feature a little like what you describe already but... not quite. I'll see how it can be tweaked.
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...
Thank you so much. 😊 Yes, I have plans for a sequel (and a sidequel about a vampire road trip across country). Just unsure when I'll get time to do more than plan them out as bullet points!
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.
Oh! And one more note - the sysop guide is not just on the web site, but in the /errata directory in each copy of the game, so when new versions come out, you can find the latest docs there at all times.
