AAGRINDER software

This page describes the dependencies of AAGRINDER, as well as software related to it in other ways.

Language and environment

The AAGRINDER client runs in a web browser and is written in the language Javascript. To allow shared client-server code, the server is also written in Javascript. The server uses Node.js to run Javascript. However, the AAGRINDER terrain generator is a separate application and is written in the language C++.

Older versions of AAGRINDER require a MySQL-compatible database for storing account data. As of 8th of July 2022, a database is not needed and a simple JSON file is used instead. Very old versions of AAGRINDER (2017) require a MongoDB database for storing account data.

Dependencies

Client

The only dependency of the AAGRINDER client is the library socket.io, which is used for asynchronous communication between the client and the server.

There are plans to some day remove the socket.io dependency and directly use the Websocket protocol directly.

Server

The AAGRINDER server, running in Node.js, has the following npm packages as dependecies:

• bcryptjs (used for cryptography with account passwords)
• express (used for serving web pages)
• socket.io (used for asynchronous communication with the client)
• js-yaml (optional; used only for Matrix bridge)
• uuid (optional; used only for Matrix bridge)
• matrix-bot-sdk (optional; used only for Matrix bridge)
• sharp (optional; used only for Matrix bridge)

Terrain generator

The AAGRINDER terrain generator includes parts of the library libnoise, which is used for generating coherent noise.

Production software

Code

Only text editors were used to write the code for AAGRINDER. As no game engines/frameworks are used, nothing binds it to any particular set of development software. Even though it has only one developer, many different text editors were used over the course of its development:

• Notepad++
• Visual Studio Code
• Atom
• Vim
• Neovim

Version control

Git is used for keeping track of changes in code. The repository used to be on GitHub, but was later moved to GitLab and can be found at https://gitlab.com/MRAAGH/aagrinder.