About Outer Space

Outer Space is turn-base 4X multiplayer on-line strategy game. Your goal is to become an Imperator of the Galaxy, racing other human players for supremacy via diplomacy, economic strength of you empire and research. And if all other means fail, you may subdue your neighbours with you powerful fleets and superior strategic thinking.

Getting started

The outerspace project consists of two big parts. One is graphic client, providing everything player needs to enjoy the game. Then there is a server side, with game server itself and AI framework.

Installation

Requirements

• python-2.7
• pygame-1.9.2 (for game client only)
• passlib-1.7 (for server only)

Python

Outerspace is written in Python2, Python 2.7 to be more specific. You can grab it on official pages, or in the repositories of you linux distributions. While selecting components during installation, make sure to have pip component enabled. On Windows machines, for advanced use of outerspace, it is also helpful to select Add python.exe to Path.

PyGame

Outer Space client is able to install the PyGame requirement automatically. It will be installed for active user only, so no administrator rights are needed.

PassLib

To maintain security of player passwords saved on the server, passlib is required by the server part. As it is security feature and should be controlled by administrator, game won't install it automatically. You can install it using pip command.

python2 -m pip install --user -U passlib

Getting the Outer Space code

The Outer Space itself has no specific needs, all you have to do is to clone git repository, or download ZIP file with the latest version and unpack it in directory of you choice.

Running Outer Space

For playing on official (default) server, all you have to do is to run outerspace.py script without any parameters (On Windows, it should be enough to execute the script from a file browser.) In case of running game from command line, all needed is

python2 ./outerspace.py

NOTE: If Outer Space fails during installation of PyGame (might occur during first run), it is most likely caused by pip package being too old. You can update it with command

python2 -m pip install -U pip

this will require administrator access, though.

Non-default configuration

NOTE (Windows): It is highly advisable to follow steps described in Using Python on Windows guide.

Running a game client

In case the Server is running on non-default remote machine, you need to know IP address of the Server and port on which the Server listens. Then you run the game with command

python2 ./outerspace.py client --server HOSTNAME:PORT_SERVER

In case you want to login to your local Server, you can do it easily by using.

python2 ./outerspace.py client --local

Server side

To achieve full functionality, you have to start main Server, then you have to set up turn ticks of the server as well as periodic triggering of the AI subsystem.

Game server

Server can be simply run with command

python2 ./outerspace.py server

which will start server listening to default TCP port 9080 on all networks.

Ticking game server

For triggering one turn, you have to run

python2 ./tools/osclient_cli.py --turns=1 admin

on the server machine. For example official server had this as a cron job, one turn per hour of working day, and once per two hours during a weekends.

NOTE: In case you want faster gaming modes, it is suggested to combine shorter ticks with bigger batches of turns evaluated at once by altering the command above. For usability reasons, it is not recommended to have ticks shorter than three minutes.

If you have fresh server, and you want to start playing, you'll want to skip grace period with command

python2 ./tools/osclient_cli.py --starttime admin

Setting up AI

AI is implemented as a headless client, utilizing same API the graphics client does. That means it has to be triggered every turn to connect to the server and issue new commands based on current situation. Also ./outerspace.py script provides two ways of running an AI. In this guide only ai-pool is interesting for us, as it goes through all AI players currently active in the game. Also running this on remote machine would be a bit tricky, as it consumes data dump in the server config directory.

python2 ./outerspace.py ai-pool

is all you need to execute for AI to get alive.