You’ll want to install all of your pre-reqs in a virtual environment. This keeps a clone of your Python interpreter sandboxed elsewhere, allowing you to install specific versions of support packages that might be different from those found in your system’s global Python install.
Install and set up the following two utilities for doing this:
Create your virtualenv:
mkdir ~/.virtualenvs
mkvirtualenv dott
Install pip in your newly created dott virtualenv, and have it install everything in the requirements.txt file:
easy_install pip
pip install -r requirements.txt
You’ll also need to install CouchDB. The instructions to do so vary, but most Linux distributions have this packaged already. Once you have CouchDB set up, Futon is pretty helpful for browsing/editing the contents of your various DBs (they’ll be created at the game’s first boot).
Your environment is ready, time to get a copy of the code (if you haven’t already). You’ll want to pull either from the main gtaylor/dott repository, or your own fork (if you’ve forked the project):
git clone git://github.com/gtaylor/dott.git
dott does not use a traditional SMTP connection. It’d be possible to write an SMTP backend, and we’d welcome the contribution for our developers, but I (gtaylor) don’t want to spend the time on it myself.
You’ll need an Amazon AWS account, and you’ll need to sign up for SES. Signup is free, and I’ll be shocked if you manage to even ring up a few pennies worth of usage. Sign up for both of these, and get your AWS API keys. You’ll need them for the next step.
Once you’re signed up, copy/paste the following into a Python module then run it:
import boto
# Substitute these two values with your own.
conn = boto.connect_ses('ACCESS_KEY', 'SECRET_KEY')
# A verification email will be sent to whatever address you want to send
# as, so you'll need to be able to check the inbox.
conn.verify_email_address('your.email@somewhere.com')
Once you receive the verification email for whatever address you state that you’ll be sending as, follow the link in the email and that specific address will be verified as a valid “Send As” value for SES.
cd into the newly created dott directory, and take a look at settings.py. You don’t want to change any of the values in there. Instead, create a new file called local_settings.py and copy/paste the setting you’d like to override into said new file.
You’ll need to change the following values at minimum:
dott is split into two different processes:
The proxy server accepts telnet connections and handles user authentication and registration. It deals with all of the boring protocol-related stuff to get players connected and whatnot. It also maintains everyone’s connection if the MUD server goes down, allowing for seamless reboots without most players ever noticing.
The MUD server handles all of the game-related stuff. It holds the world, tracks NPCs, handles combat, and does all of the fun stuff. The proxy just pipes input into the MUD server, and spits back out whatever the MUD server says.
You’ll need to start the two pieces separately:
twistd --pidfile=proxy.pid -ny proxy.tac
twistd --pidfile=server.pid -ny server.tac
After you run both of these, you should be able to connect to port 4000 and create a character.
Note
You may stop/start the two processes independently of one another, and normal operation will resume once they are both running at the same time. It’s perfectly acceptable to restart server.tac, and is in fact how we handle code reloading.