TomeNET

According to the TomeNET home page, "TomeNET is a multiplayer fantasy dungeon exploration game based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is a game that emphasizes intricate, challenging, and varied gameplay over graphics. Hundreds of different monsters in randomly-generated, unpredictable dungeons will strive to slay you by various means, and you counter - if you survive - by developing the skills of your choice and wielding mighty artifacts." It is a Roguelike game with both a plain text interface and graphical interfaces that replicate the text interface with multiple moveable windows for user convenience.

Getting Started

Download the Client

You can find the latest client at the TomeNET downloads page for your operating system. An outdated client will complain when you connect to the server that it's out of date, but should mostly work. Always a good idea to match your client version against the server though.

Connect to the Server

After you install and run the program, it should generate a config file which you can then edit to change the default server name to cygnus.srhuston.net. You can also enter the server name at the appropriate point in the startup sequence. Note that if you connect to the default server which is presented via the metaserver, it will of course work but you're connecting to a server in Europe which may have quite a bit of lag. If you want to play with us on the server in the US, you'll want to edit the config file or enter cygnus.srhuston.net in the server field. The config file is called TomeNET.ini on Windows, and ~/.tomenetrc on Mac OS and Linux.

More Detailed Documentation

Some information getting started with TomeNET is available on the TomeNET getting started page as well. Even using our server instead of the default one, you will find this useful to get into the game and begin your journey.

For plenty of detailed information, refer to The Guide which can be accessed online or in the client with the command ~g. The only thing better than The Guide for documentation in the game is the source code itself!

Other Notes

These are mostly notes for myself - I do updates on this system so infrequently (roughly every year it seems) and invariably by the time I'm doing it again I've forgotten what happened last time. So now I'm trying to write everything down while it's fresh in my mind so that next time maybe I won't have as hard of a time.

Server Install

Downloading the source tarball and running a make was easy enough; I did change the client from the X11 one to the "main-x11.c and main-gcu.c" variant without SDL. I think I had to install SDL-devel as well, but I may have done that for MAngband a day or so prior. I don't, however, run that client locally for things; instead I use the downloaded tomenet-4.7.4a-linux-amd64 binary package which is in my user account (not the server's account) and that works well for connecting over SSH either for running or administrative access.

Client Install

MacOS

On milton and syrinx I used the TomeNET-474a-client-OSX-amd64-complete.tar.bz2 binary tarball. For both I uncompressed them in ~/Installs, then renamed the directory TomeNET. Next I did mkdir -p ~/TomeNET.app/Contents/MacOS ; cp TomeNET.command ~/TomeNET.app/Contents/MacOS/TomeNET and then edited that file to replace the cd call at the top with the full path for where the binary lives. Finally I can take this new "app" and drop it on the dock to run TomeNET directly from there. This works well for both machines, and after the first execution the ~/.tomenetrc file was edited and has some sane defaults including the server line.

ChromeOS

For the Chromebooks I used the tomenet-4.7.4a-linux-amd64.tar.bz2 binary tarball. Similarly it was uncompressed into ~/Installs and renamed. Untested but should work to add to ~/.bashrc a new alias: alias tomenet='(cd ~/Installs/tomenet ; ./tomenet)'. On my laptop instead I uncompressed the data into ~/Installs/tomenet/bin and moved the lib directory to ~/Installs/tomenet/lib, then set TOMENET_PATH to ~/Installs/tomenet/lib and just calling 'tomenet' from $PATH works.