signaturebeef / paper-tiger

Paper Tiger is an experimental Terraria server written in C for POSIX-based operating systems

Paper Tiger

Paper Tiger is an experimental Terraria server written in C for OSX, WIN32 and Linux systems.

Paper Tiger aims to implement as much as possible of the official server from Re-Logic, in an efficient and cross-platform manner, with included extras such as scripting support, plugin support, and extra security features. Paper Tiger is designed to not require any external third-party runtimes on Linux or OSX (such as mono), and is packagable and runnable as a system service.

Paper Tiger is designed for the official Terraria client, and does not support third-party, or unlicensed Terraria clients.

Paper Tiger is free, and released under the GPLv2, which you can find in the LICENSE file.

Technical Information

Paper tiger is written in a mix of C and C++ and is heavily based on the event-loop paradigm based on libuv.

libuv provides a cross-platform event loop mechanism, and Paper Tiger leverages this feature to efficiently implement a gameserver in a cross-platform manner without having to deal with threading between POSIX and Win32 environments. The game's event loop (see struct game) is responsible for handling stream I/O from all the connected clients as well as the game update routines and console input.

The software is primarily written in in C, however there are some parts of the system which leverate c++11 features. One such feature is the parameter parser (see src/param.cc) where a cross-platform regex implementation was needed.

Platforms

Paper Tiger has been tested to build run on Linux (Fedora 23), MacOSX 10.10, and Windows 10.

Building Paper Tiger

Paper Tiger currently has been tested to build on MacOSX, Linux, and Windows. Building for all platforms requires CMake.

Note: Building on windows does not require MINGW or Cygwin.

Building on Linux

• Install the build dependencies: make, cmake, gcc-c++, libuv-devel
• Clone the source: git clone https://github.com/tylerjwatson/paper-tiger.git
• Use CMake to build:

$ cd paper-tiger
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make

Building on OSX

• Install the build dependencies. cmake, libuv. I used homebrew for this.
• Install, and accept the license terms for XCode
• Clone the source: git clone https://github.com/tylerjwatson/paper-tiger.git
• Open Terminal.app, and use CMake to build:

$ cd paper-tiger
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake -G XCode ..
$ xcodebuild

Building on Windows

• Install CMake for Windows
• Install Visual Studio 2015 Community with C++ support.
  • Note: MFC is not required.
• Clone the source: git clone https://github.com/tylerjwatson/paper-tiger.git using CLI tools or the Github desktop client
• Use CMake GUI to generate a Visual Studio Solution
  1. Run CMake GUI
  2. In the Where is the source code box, choose the directory that the Paper Tiger source code was cloned into, eg. C:\src\paper-tiger
  3. In the Where to build the binaries box, choose another directory in which the build files shall be placed.
  4. Press Configure, then Generate.
  5. Navigate to the build directory as specified in step 3, and open the paper-tiger.sln file in Visual Studio
  6. Build and enjoy.

Running Paper Tiger

paper-tiger (or paper-tiger.exe on Windows) currently only accepts the following commandline params

• -w <path> - Loads a world file at <path>
• -s - Silent mode, do not open or accept console commands.

Run paper-tiger or paper-tiger.exe in the console to launch it.