"SkotOS" Skotos Open Source Game Library

This is a pre-release version of the Skotos Open Source game library, aka "SkotOS", written for use with Dworkin's Game Driver, aka "DGD". It a fourth-generation text MUD engine that has been in devopment and active use for almost two decades by Skotos Tech in a number of commercial web-centric prose online games, including Castle Marrach, Ironclaw Online, Lovecraft Country, and The Lazurus Project.

Status

This version is very pre-release and unsupported — installation is difficult, documentation is minimal, and a new web client needs to be built. The main goal of this initial release was to remove proprietary game content and and personal information from the commercial version used in games offered by Skotos Tech.

We are seeking volunteers to take this code to the 1.0 level suitable for anyone to quickly install the game and create their own web-centric prose games.

Copyright & Open Source Licenses

The library itself (all the portions written in LPC) and library documentation are licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License 3.0. All other documentation, the shared game code and common objects (written in a combination of Merry code & XML data) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 license. There is no requirement to release your own game code and objects under any open source license, but any derivative works of the library (AGPL) or contributions to the shared game code and objects (CC-SA) must be released under the same license. All uses of this code must prominently give attribution to "Skotos Tech, Inc" and link to https://www.skotos.net .

Contributions

We welcome contributions back to this library and to shared game code and objects, but we do require a Contributors License to be signed by any contributor. The contributors license is still a work-in-progress, contact Shannon Appelcline [email protected] for more information.

The following text is very preliminary and a work-in-progress.

Preparing Your VPS

For best reliability and stability, set your SkotOS instance up on a virtual private server (VPS).

Linode has proven to be a very stable locale for SkotOS games with high uptime, but any VPS should do the job. The following referrals codes can be used if you want to earn a month of free time:

Linode Referral Code: https://www.linode.com/?r=3c7fa15a78407c9a3d4aefb027539db2557b3765 Digital Ocean: http://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=a6060686b88a

Create Your Machine

SkotOS games have relatively low requirements and can be run on low-end VPSes. At Linode, the Linode 2048 is suggested, which has 30 GB of storage and 1 CPU core — though you could probably get started on the Linode 1024, which has just 20 GB of storage.

If you've got a decent, modern CPU, then the storage will be the biggest requirement. It will slowly grow with time and usage, but most modern VPSes will let you easily upgrade the time comes.

All of Skotos' SkotOS games run on either Debian 7.5 or Debian 8.0. Debian is generally suggested as a known stable platform, though other versions of Linux will probably work just as well.

Installing SkotOS 1.0

SkotOS can be installed from this Github repository. Clone it, copy it, or download a ZIP as you see fit.

Install the Files

You'll want to install the files in their directory, such as /var/skotoslib. This document will use ${SKOTOSLIB} to refer to the SkotOS directory.

Edit the Config Files

There are two major config files: ${SKOTOSLIB}/skoto.dgd contains a variety of information on variable sizes and ports, while ${SKOTOSLIB}/skoot/user/System/data/instance contains connectivity data.

You will want to:

Change the directory in skotos.dgd. Note that it should be set to ${SKOTOSLIB}/skoot, which is to say the skoot directory in your ${SKOTOSLIB}, not the main directory itself.
Change the XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX instances at the top of skotos.dgd to your IP address.
Change the hostname in instance.

Optionally Change the Ports

By default, SkotOS is set to respond to ports 80 and 443, but it actually hangs out and listens on a variety of ports in the 10,000 range. If you want to change this you can do so by editing both skotos.dgd andinstance. Be sure to change the portbase in instance to another number in the form X000, then change all of the ports in both files from 10YYY to XYYY. For example, if you choose your portbase to be 8000, your telnet_port would be 8098 and your first binary_port would be 8099.

You probably don't want to adjust the ports unless you plan to run multiple instances of SkotOS on the same machine. But, if you do want to, this is simple: just be sure that each SkotOS game is (1) installed in a different directory; (2) has a different hostname; (3) has a different IP address; and (4) listens to a different range of ports.

Adjusting Your Network

You will also need to make a few changes to your local network setup to accomodate the SkotOS instance.

Open Your Firewall

Be sure to adjust your Firewall so that it accepts connections on all the machines. The following iptables rules should make everything accessible:

-A INPUT -p tcp --dport    80 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp --dport   443 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp --dport   843 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp --dport  10080 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp --dport  10090 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp --dport  10098 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp --dport  10099 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p udp --dport  10023 -j ACCEPT

Be sure to rerun your firewall rules afterward, usually witha command like the following:

$ /sbin/iptables-restore < /etc/your-firewall-rules

Starting SkotOS

At this point SkotOS is easy to start.

Run The Driver

To start things going, run:

$ ${SKOTOSLIB}/driver.run ${SKOTOSLIB}/skotos.dgd

The first time that SkotOS runs you should see lots of creative work. A new file will appear in your home directory, skotos.database. This is your database in the file system, which will let you restore your game if the machine crashes.

When the initial cold boot is done, you should see something like this:

Apr 27 15:10:57 ** info:Boot completed.

Restart the Driver

You should probably kill your driver now. You'll see messages as it cleanly shuts down and does a statedump. You can now run SkotOS with a standard invocation that also references the new statedump file.

${SKOTOSLIB}/driver.run ${SKOTOSLIB}/skotos.dgd ${SKOTOSLIB}/skotos.database

You'll know you restore from the backup if you see this:

Apr 27 16:25:23 ** info:Reboot completed.

Cron the Driver

You will probably want to set your game to restart at machine start-up by putting something like this in your crontab:

@reboot ${SKOTOSLIB}/driver.run ${SKOTOSLIB}/skotos.dgd ${SKOTOSLIB}/skotos.database