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[DrCyano]

Greetings bearded ones!

I've been thinking of organizing a shared fortress or even a community fortress, but I don't
know the best way to share a game save with other people (who are on other continents in vastly different time zones).

I've tried using a git repository in the past, but DF saves are a poor match for DVCS (and I don't care about preserving the entire fortress history anyway). I also tried rsync scripts with my file server, which works pretty well, but only on Linux computers.

What tools do you know of to facilitate shared DF forts? Anyone care to share their experience with participating in a shared/community fortress?

[Superdorf]

This site here is the gold standard for public fortress storage.

[DrCyano]

How do you manage people's schedules to avoid save overriding?

I was hoping there was some 3rd party DF launcher that would have some mechanism for checking out/in and locking a save so you could know if someone else was playing that save at that moment.

I do a bit of programming in my free time so I could make such a launcher if there's interest, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel if this had already been solved.

[NordicNooob]

You just... don't manage it. Normally somebody sticks the save up, and then whoever's interested says "yo, I'm gonna take the fort for a spin" and then downloads the save, plays their time, and puts up a download for the new save when they're done. No complex overriding, just simple duplication; this way we can all still access the older saves for looking and whatnot, but also it's just way easier to do than make a fancy website that has the kind of problem you're imagining as well as a solution for it.

[chips]

I had a friend set up a server once for DF. His home PC was the server. Anyone could access any play dwarf fortress on his computer if they had putty and the login details. The catch is he didn't figure out how to set it up so only 1 person could control it at a time, it was literally a virtual machine running DF and his networking programs so people could access it. Imagine vanilla DF, except 2-3 people have keyboards and mice and are trying to play the same game, at the same time. Everyone seemed to get really frustrated at the shared controls but it was functional, pretty bad ass, and not too hard to set up. He ran server side and i ran client side when we did testing, got it up in a few days with minimal programming knowledge. It was a lot of fun tho accessing it and seeing what everyone else was up to, trying to outdo eachothers masterworks. Only managed to convince a few people to play and didn't open it to the public, so there was never too many people online.

[Salmeuk]

How do you manage people's schedules to avoid save overriding?

I was hoping there was some 3rd party DF launcher that would have some mechanism for checking out/in and locking a save so you could know if someone else was playing that save at that moment.

I do a bit of programming in my free time so I could make such a launcher if there's interest, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel if this had already been solved.

DrCyano, you would be the first to make it, but you would also quickly find out why it hasn't been made. There isn't much demand for such a tool, since DF players seem to take their time when it comes to updates. A forum post or comment is 'good enough.'

if such a tool was to be created people might find it to be very helpful, but not exactly necessary you know? not like DFhack.

Conversely, this thread would benefit greatly from such a tool.

Also realize this is a bit of a necro. Ah well.

[DrCyano]

I had a friend set up a server once for DF. His home PC was the server. Anyone could access any play dwarf fortress on his computer if they had putty and the login details. The catch is he didn't figure out how to set it up so only 1 person could control it at a time, it was literally a virtual machine running DF and his networking programs so people could access it. Imagine vanilla DF, except 2-3 people have keyboards and mice and are trying to play the same game, at the same time. Everyone seemed to get really frustrated at the shared controls but it was functional, pretty bad ass, and not too hard to set up. He ran server side and i ran client side when we did testing, got it up in a few days with minimal programming knowledge. It was a lot of fun tho accessing it and seeing what everyone else was up to, trying to outdo eachothers masterworks. Only managed to convince a few people to play and didn't open it to the public, so there was never too many people online.

Thank you for sharing that!. I've wanted to do this with my friends but I wasn't sure if it was possible with standard VM tools. Good to see that it is!