PlanetsCentral

streu in Re: Offline PHost game hosti...:

PHost itself should be trivial

Trivial if you know how things are supposed to fit together. I'm pretty sure PHost itself will run fine, it's everything that goes around it. Trying to figure out what directory structure things are supposed to have, for example; I find the documentation for various programs somewhat lacking. Couldn't figure out where to get appropriate files for PList 3.2, don't remember if I even got a universe mastered properly.

OK, I had assumed you had already tried this before; before operating systems made running DOS apps complicated

The official source for AMaster and PList is The Vagabond. PList is also available through the Download Center.

The AMaster archive contains DOS and Linux binaries, no Windows binaries, that would be something you need to invoke from DOSBOX. Maybe that would be an argument for you to do your hosting completely in DOSBOX. If you want to use PMaster, that one has a Windows binary as well. PlanetsCentral uses PMaster for the Titan games, because AMaster cannot do the classic "homeworlds in a circle".

Regarding the actual hosting procedure, there's two sections in the PHost docs:

• First time - for hosts
• Hosting with PHost - Setting up new Games

The normal directory setup is: all programs in one directory (the root directory), all game data files in another, and then invoke tools from the program directory as "phost path/to/game".

Files like xyplan.dat, planet.nm should be in the game directory, but if the are not there, all programs also find them in the root directory.

I'm not clear either if wrapped maps are native to PHost or if some add-on is needed.

Wrapped maps are natively supported, just set AllowWraparoundMaps=Yes (and an appropriate WraparoundRectangle) in pconfig.src and amaster.src. PlanetsCentral's Wrapped Map building block is just that, config options.

Best regards,
Stefan

Note to self: set up CI builds for Windows binaries of PHost utilities