Evennia on VM / TinyCore / Raspberry Pi / QEMU ?

[Tristano Ajmone]

Hi everybody,

I have a Raspberry Pi which was recently given to me as a gift. Still not operative because didn't get around to find powersupply, SD card, ecc.

Now I was thinking of setting it up with a running copy of Evennia so I can share it online with a group of friends for testing.

I've read that it has been done. Is there anyone on the group who had experience setting it up in RasPi?

I was thinking of going for the TinyCore micro distro of Linux. Now Tiny is on v6 (linux kernel 3.16.6) an there is a piCore release (28 Mb) as well:

– Arm V6 Raspberry Pi –

http://www.tinycorelinux.net/arm.html

And a piCore-qemu version (5 Mb) as well, which makes it nice to test locally in VM

QEMU for Win is available here:

http://qemu.weilnetz.de/

The lastest being rather fresh:

15-Jan-2015 22:45   20M  QEMU Installer for Windows (64 bit)

All of which brings to mind the idea than rather than having a VM file for VirtualBox or WMWare it would be worth pointing at QEMU for various reasons:

A QEMU with prebuilt Evennia wouldn't need installation
The same Pi-Core image works for local as well as for Raspberry
TinyCore is a really barebone Linux distro, which should be good for an Evennia-only distro to release.
I've also come across Levinux, a 20Mb standalone linux distro (built on TinyLinux) which runs without installation on Linux, Mac and Windows. The whole project is Python-oriented, but it comes with Python3 by default. Levinux is also a good candidate for a testing distro due to it's small size.

http://mikelev.in/ux/

I haven't had the change to play around with neither Tiny nor Raspberry. Has anyone got some advice on eventual pitfalls, best approaches, or whatever?

Is the Raspberry Pi suited for the task? At least for a testing ground to be accessed by let's say 5 people and a world of medium size?

Tristano

[Griatch Art]

Hi,

I installed Evennia on a Raspberry Pi B+ this past weekend. I used the Raspbian image from raspberrypi.org. I used the instructions on their homepage for copying the OS image to the SD card.

I used a cellphone power charger cable to run the pi and wired it to a WiFi router so I could ssh to it (I have no screen with a HDMI connection). From there on, installing the virtualenv and running pip to get all Evennia needs was trivial.
.
Griatch

[owl...@gmail.com]

That was the idea that got me started with Evennia - to be able to host and develop my own game on Rpi's. Got two dedicated Rpi's for the purpose. Both model B, one running Raspbian, the other one Arch Arm. Not the best choices - a minimal distro is probably the right way to go. But other than that it has worked out just fine. A bit sluggish, yes. A mini distro might lighten the burden? Though I haven't come to test it out with the load of a great amount of objects -  but  @reloads takes significantly much longer than on my laptop, and so on. But that's not unexpected, I guess. I'm planning to order myself a RPi 2 pretty soon, to remedy that.  But in the end much I'm confident: RPi as Evennia server = Brilliance and success.

[Tristano Ajmone]

Thank you both for the reply! From what I gather I have the B model too. I'll then go for the Raspbian distro first. From what I read, piCore5 was not so easy to setup and lacked some packages. Maybe v6 solved the issues but I haven't yet found a review or tutorial on it.

Best keep it simple for testing purposes. Then if any project does take off I might look into some mini-itx solution.

I had a look around for VPS prices, there are load of solutions out there, from €5 a month onward, €10/15 being the average for a middle-service, but also some solutions at €3 per years (very low specs though). Setting it up locally, or on a Rpi should help me workout how much a full running Evennia will drain on resources, otherwise I have no idea what sort of specs to look for in VPS. Some VPS services are very customizable, I've seen a solution that works with prepaid credits which you load into your account, and then you can vary your daily settings according to needs: ram, disk, whatever. That sounds good, it allows you to start with as low as 64Mb of RAM and up to Gigs, according to needs as the project grows. These solutions could provide reasonable grounding for an online project, with a cost expectation between €50-100 yearly, and more as the project grows. It would only require a modest sponsor to start some Mud.

For the time being I'll try to put something online to share with my friends using a computer of some sort at home (Pi for a start). I am lucky to have a fiber-optic Lan internet connection (not available in the whole city, only in some areas). It's meant to be 10Mb/s (upload/donwload) and its not far from that speed in real use. With an extra €5 a month I could upgrade to 100Mb/s, with a realistic expectation of 50-60Mb/s in real performance. It has fixed IP by default and the router allows port forwarding for virtual servers (it has a strange interface, not exactly standard, as a fact in the past there where lots of problems connecting to some sites, due to NAT settings, especially with game consoles, but they changed it in the last years because people with consoles were changing provider, so it's pretty much standard now). I don't use the Internet except for surfing, so my bandwith is quite free (no filesharing, ecc).

I want to give a copy of the portable evennia I made to a friend who is a pub-owner. A few years ago he contacted me because he saw a pub in the countryside (not far from Turin city) which is a sort of club for RPG fans. They had set up some computer network in the pub that allowed each customer to interact with other people in the pub via some kiosk at the table. They used it for some games, or for chatting (something related to dating I think, the idea was that you could chat without revealing your identity within the pub). Anyhow, even though I haven't been at the pub, I know it had some success. My friend asked me if we could setup something similar in his own pub, but at the time there were no cheap solutions. RaspPi and Evennia could provide a good solution, especially if implemented with Wifi (messing up with cables wiring was one of the obstacles at the time).

As a fact, I am looking at using Evennia more for social MUDing, I am not much into fantasy genre games, or dice-rolling and fighting, ecc. And I like Intranet solutions a lot (there is quite a demand for them lately, citizens groups have been looking into WiFi intranet projects to build area-specific projects). A friend of mine asked the government a license to setup a Wifi intranet for our city district, and they granted him a 10 years license for something like €5 (costs for registering with council). He didn't start the project because of server-costs related problems, but the project is still open to proposals. One of the core ideas of the intranet was to provide a live chat and a blackboard for employment offers/demands. Our district is highly affected by the crisis, and people are looking for part-time jobs all the time. Of course, Internet is a dispersive solution because the project aims at being geographically specific, so Intranet Wifi could grant a local-only audience. My research started with BBSs in mind, then I came across MUDs, and finally Evennia. I saw that Evennia could interface easily to BBS like services, and though it would be great to mix web and terminal access into a persistent world where chats and message boards could fall within a customizable world open to social gaming, and other fun stuff.

Ok, that was a bit off-topic, but I thought I'd share the various Hows of how I got here and where I'd like to head. Maybe it will turn out into a full-fleshed project, maybe just an experiment. Who knows... in the meantime it's a great opportunity to practice Python and learn more about Django--and of course, have fun.

;-)

[owl...@gmail.com]

Tristano, wow! That pub project sounds fantastic! Nice to have you around - looking forward to see what you succeed to do with Evennia!
(If the RPi got a ethernet port - it's a model B)