Using the Arxcode game dir

Warning

Arxcode is separately maintained.

While Arxcode uses Evennia, it is not part of Evennia itself; we include this documentation only as a service to users. Also, while Arxcode is still actively maintained (2022), these instructions are based on the Arx-code released as of Aug 12, 2018. They will probably not work 100% out of the box anymore.

Arxcode bugs should be directed to the Arxcode github issue tracker.

Arx - After the Reckoning is a big and very popular Evennia-based game. Arx is heavily roleplaying-centric, relying on game masters to drive the story. Technically it’s maybe best described as “a MUSH, but with more coded systems”. In August of 2018, the game’s developer, Tehom, generously released the source code of Arx on github. This is a treasure-trove for developers wanting to pick ideas or even get a starting game to build on.

It’s not too hard to run Arx from the sources (of course you’ll start with an empty database) but since part of Arx has grown organically, it doesn’t follow standard Evennia paradigms everywhere. This page covers one take on installing and setting things up while making your new Arx-based game better match with the vanilla Evennia install.

Installing Evennia

Firstly, set aside a folder/directory on your drive for everything to follow.

You need to start by installing Evennia by following most of the Git-installation instructions for your OS. The difference is that instead of cloning from upstream Evennia, you should do

git clone https://github.com/TehomCD/evennia.git

This is because Arx uses TehomCD’s older Evennia 0.8 fork, notably still using Python2. This detail is important if referring to newer Evennia documentation.

If you are new to Evennia it’s highly recommended that you run through the normal install instructions in full - including initializing and starting a new empty game and connecting to it. That way you can be sure Evennia works correctly as a baseline.

After installing you should have a virtualenv running and you should have the following file structure in your set-aside folder:

muddev/
   vienv/
   evennia/
   mygame/

Here mygame is the empty game you created during the Evennia install, with evennia --init. Go to that and run evennia stop to make sure your empty game is not running. We’ll instead let Evenna run Arx, so in principle you could erase mygame - but it could also be good to have a clean game to compare to.

Installing Arxcode

cd to the root of your directory and clone the released source code from github:

git clone https://github.com/Arx-Game/arxcode.git myarx

A new folder myarx should appear next to the ones you already had. You could rename this to something else if you want.

cd into myarx. If you wonder about the structure of the game dir, you can read more about it here.

Clean up settings

Arx has split evennia’s normal settings into base_settings.py and production_settings.py. It also has its own solution for managing ‘secret’ parts of the settings file. We’ll keep most of Arx way but we’ll remove the secret-handling and replace it with the normal Evennia method.

cd into myarx/server/conf/ and open the file settings.py in a text editor. The top part (within """...""") is just help text. Wipe everything underneath that and make it look like this instead (don’t forget to save):

from base_settings import *

TELNET_PORTS = [4000]
SERVERNAME = "MyArx"
GAME_SLOGAN = "The cool game"

try:
    from server.conf.secret_settings import *
except ImportError:
    print("secret_settings.py file not found or failed to import.")

Note: Indents and capitalization matter in Python. Make indents 4 spaces (not tabs) for your own sanity. If you want a starter on Python in Evennia, [you can look here](Beginner-Tutorial-Python-basic- introduction).

This will import Arx’ base settings and override them with the Evennia-default telnet port and give the game a name. The slogan changes the sub-text shown under the name of your game in the website header. You can tweak these to your own liking later.

Next, create a new, empty file secret_settings.py in the same location as the settings.py file. This can just contain the following:

SECRET_KEY = "sefsefiwwj3 jnwidufhjw4545_oifej whewiu hwejfpoiwjrpw09&4er43233fwefwfw"

Replace the long random string with random ASCII characters of your own. The secret key should not be shared.

Next, open myarx/server/conf/base_settings.py in your text editor. We want to remove/comment out all mentions of the decouple package, which Evennia doesn’t use (we use private_settings.py to hide away settings that should not be shared).

Comment out from decouple import config by adding a # to the start of the line: # from decouple import config. Then search for config( in the file and comment out all lines where this is used. Many of these are specific to the server environment where the original Arx runs, so is not that relevant to us.

Install Arx dependencies

Arx has some further dependencies beyond vanilla Evennia. Start by cd:ing to the root of your myarx folder.

If you run Linux or Mac: Edit myarx/requirements.txt and comment out the line pypiwin32==219 - it’s only needed on Windows and will give an error on other platforms.

Make sure your virtualenv is active, then run

pip install -r requirements.txt

The needed Python packages will be installed for you.

Adding logs/ folder

The Arx repo does not contain the myarx/server/logs/ folder Evennia expects for storing server logs. This is simple to add:

# linux/mac
mkdir server/logs
# windows
mkdir server\logs

Setting up the database and starting

From the myarx folder, run

evennia migrate

This creates the database and will step through all database migrations needed.

evennia start

If all goes well Evennia will now start up, running Arx! You can connect to it on localhost (or 127.0.0.1 if your platform doesn’t alias localhost), port 4000 using a Telnet client. Alternatively, you can use your web browser to browse to http://localhost:4001 to see the game’s website and get to the web client.

When you log in you’ll get the standard Evennia greeting (since the database is empty), but you can try help to see that it’s indeed Arx that is running.

Additional Setup Steps

The first time you start Evennia after creating the database with the evennia migrate step above, it should create a few starting objects for you - your superuser account, which it will prompt you to enter, a starting room (Limbo), and a character object for you. If for some reason this does not occur, you may have to follow the steps below. For the first time Superuser login you may have to run steps 7-8 and 10 to create and connect to your in-came Character.

  1. Login to the game website with your Superuser account.

  2. Press the Admin button to get into the (Django-) Admin Interface.

  3. Navigate to the Accounts section.

  4. Add a new Account named for the new staffer. Use a place holder password and dummy e-mail address.

  5. Flag account as Staff and apply the Admin permission group (This assumes you have already set up an Admin Group in Django).

  6. Add Tags named player and developer.

  7. Log into the game using the web client (or a third-party telnet client) using your superuser account. Move to where you want the new staffer character to appear.

  8. In the game client, run @create/drop <staffername>:typeclasses.characters.Character, where <staffername> is usually the same name you used for the Staffer account you created in the Admin earlier (if you are creating a Character for your superuser, use your superuser account name). This creates a new in-game Character and places it in your current location.

  9. Have the new Admin player log into the game.

  10. Have the new Admin puppet the character with @ic StafferName.

  11. Have the new Admin change their password - @password <old password> = <new password>.

Now that you have a Character and an Account object, there’s a few additional things you may need to do in order for some commands to function properly. You can either execute these as in-game commands while ic (controlling your character object).

py from web.character.models import RosterEntry;RosterEntry.objects.create(player=self.player, character=self)

py from world.dominion.models import PlayerOrNpc, AssetOwner;dompc = PlayerOrNpc.objects.create(player=self.player);AssetOwner.objects.create(player=dompc)

Those steps will give you ‘RosterEntry’, ‘PlayerOrNpc’, and ‘AssetOwner’ objects. RosterEntry explicitly connects a character and account object together, even while offline, and contains additional information about a character’s current presence in game (such as which ‘roster’ they’re in, if you choose to use an active roster of characters). PlayerOrNpc are more character extensions, as well as support for npcs with no in-game presence and just represented by a name which can be offscreen members of a character’s family. It also allows for membership in Organizations. AssetOwner holds information about a character or organization’s money and resources.

Alternate Windows install guide

Contributed by Pax

If for some reason you cannot use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (which would use instructions identical to the ones above), it’s possible to get Evennia/Arx running under Anaconda for Windows. The process is a little bit trickier.

Make sure you have:

Set up a convenient repository place for things.

cd ~
mkdir Source
cd Source
mkdir Arx
cd Arx

Replace the SSH git clone links below with your own github forks. If you don’t plan to change Evennia at all, you can use the evennia/evennia.git repo instead of a forked one.

git clone git@github.com:<youruser>/evennia.git
git clone git@github.com:<youruser>/arxcode.git

Evennia is a package itself, so we want to install it and all of its prerequisites, after switching to the appropriately-tagged branch for Arxcode.

cd evennia
git checkout tags/v0.7 -b arx-master
pip install -e .

Arx has some dependencies of its own, so now we’ll go install them As it is not a package, we’ll use the normal requirements file.

cd ../arxcode
pip install -r requirements.txt

The git repo doesn’t include the empty log directory and Evennia is unhappy if you don’t have it, so while still in the arxcode directory…

mkdir server/logs

Now hit https://github.com/evennia/evennia/wiki/Arxcode-installing-help and change the setup stuff as in the ‘Clean up settings’ section.

Then we will create our default database…

../evennia/bin/windows/evennia.bat migrate

…and do the first run. You need winpty because Windows does not have a TTY/PTY by default, and so the Python console input commands (used for prompts on first run) will fail and you will end up in an unhappy place. Future runs, you should not need winpty.

winpty ../evennia/bin/windows/evennia.bat start

Once this is done, you should have your Evennia server running Arxcode up on localhost at port 4000, and the webserver at http://localhost:4001/.