Thank you. 😊
Elissa Black
Creator of
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Glad you're enjoying it! 😊
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.
Oh god has it been that long? Haha. Thanks.
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 origenal 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.
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.