evennia/docs/source/Howto/Starting/Directory-Overview.md

Overview of your new Game Dir

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Now we have 'run the game' a bit and looked at what can be done in-game. It is time to start to look at how things look 'outside of the game'. Let's do a tour of the game-dir you just created. Like everywhere in the docs we'll assume it's called mygame.

You may have noticed when we were building things in-game that we would often refer to code through "python paths", such as

    A 'python path' uses '.' instead of '/' or '`\\`' and
    skips the `.py` ending of files. It can also point to 
    the code contents of python files. Since Evennia is already 
    looking for code in your game dir, your python paths can start 
    from there. 

    So a path `/home/foo/devel/mygame/commands/command.py`
    would translate to a Python-path `commands.command`. 

create/drop button:tutorial_examples.red_button.RedButton

This is a fundamental aspect of coding Evennia - you create code and then you tell Evennia where that code is and when it should be used. Above we told it to create a red button by pulling from specific code in the contribs/ folder but the same principle is true everywhere. So it's important to know where code is and how you point to it correctly.

• mygame/
  • commands/ - This holds all your custom commands (user-input handlers). You both add your own and override Evennia's defaults from here.
  • server/ - The structure of this folder should not change since Evennia expects it.
    • conf/ - All server configuration files sits here. The most important file is settings.py.
    • logs/ - Server log files are stored here. When you use evennia --log you are actually tailing the files in this directory.
  • typeclasses/ - this holds empty templates describing all database-bound entities in the game, like Characters, Scripts, Accounts etc. Adding code here allows to customize and extend the defaults.
  • web/ - This is where you override and extend the default templates, views and static files used for Evennia's web-presence, like the website and the HTML5 webclient.
  • world/ - this is a "miscellaneous" folder holding everything related to the world you are building, such as build scripts and rules modules that don't fit with one of the other folders.

The server/ subfolder should remain the way it is - Evennia expects this. But you could in principle change the structure of the rest of your game dir as best fits your preference. Maybe you don't need a world/ folder but prefer many folders with different aspects of your world? Or a new folder 'rules' for your RPG rules? This is fine. If you move things around you just need to update Evennia's default settings to point to the right places in the new structure.

commands/

The commands/ folder holds Python modules related to creating and extending the Commands of Evennia. These manifest in game like the server understanding input like look or dig.

A `module` is the common term for a file ending with the `.py` file ending. A module
is a text file containing Python source code.

Evennia library layout:

If you cloned the GIT repo following the instructions, you will have a folder named evennia. The top level of it contains Python package specific stuff such as a readme file, setup.py etc. It also has two subfoldersbin/ and evennia/ (again).

The bin/ directory holds OS-specific binaries that will be used when installing Evennia with pip as per the Getting started instructions. The library itself is in the evennia subfolder. From your code you will access this subfolder simply by import evennia.

• evennia
  • __init__.py - The "flat API" of Evennia resides here.
  • commands/ - The command parser and handler.
    • default/ - The default commands and cmdsets.
  • comms/ - Systems for communicating in-game.
  • contrib/ - Optional plugins too game-specific for core Evennia.
  • game_template/ - Copied to become the "game directory" when using evennia --init.
  • help/ - Handles the storage and creation of help entries.
  • locale/ - Language files (i18n).
  • locks/ - Lock system for restricting access to in-game entities.
  • objects/ - In-game entities (all types of items and Characters).
  • prototypes/ - Object Prototype/spawning system and OLC menu
  • accounts/ - Out-of-game Session-controlled entities (accounts, bots etc)
  • scripts/ - Out-of-game entities equivalence to Objects, also with timer support.
  • server/ - Core server code and Session handling.
    • portal/ - Portal proxy and connection protocols.
  • settings_default.py - Root settings of Evennia. Copy settings from here to mygame/server/settings.py file.
  • typeclasses/ - Abstract classes for the typeclass storage and database system.
  • utils/ - Various miscellaneous useful coding resources.
  • web/ - Web resources and webserver. Partly copied into game directory on initialization.

All directories contain files ending in .py. These are Python modules and are the basic units of Python code. The roots of directories also have (usually empty) files named __init__.py. These are required by Python so as to be able to find and import modules in other directories. When you have run Evennia at least once you will find that there will also be .pyc files appearing, these are pre-compiled binary versions of the .py files to speed up execution.

The root of the evennia folder has an __init__.py file containing the "flat API". This holds shortcuts to various subfolders in the evennia library. It is provided to make it easier to find things; it allows you to just import evennia and access things from that rather than having to import from their actual locations inside the source tree.

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