Memor-i Studio

Memor-i is a Memory card game especially tailored to meet the needs of blind people.

Memor-i Studio, is an online games repository that people can use in order to create their own flavors of Memor-i game!

Installation Instructions:

Pre-installation requirements

This project assumes working installations of the following technologies / components:

1. PHP (version >= 7.2)

2. MySQL

3. composer (PHP package manager)

4. npm (Front-end dependencies package manager)

5. Laravel

6. Apache Web Server (or any other Web Server you are comfortable with)

First time install (setup database and install dependencies)

0. Make sure php 7.2 (or newer) is installed.

1. Install the Laravel IMAP dependencies:

   sudo apt-get install php*-imap php*-mbstring php*-mcrypt && sudo apache2ctl graceful

2. After cloning the project, create an .env file (should be a copy of .env.example), containing the information about your database name and credentials.

3. Install laravel/back-end dependencies

   composer install
   composer dump-autoload

4. Install front-end dependencies

   npm install

5. Create the database schema:

   php artisan config:clear
   
   php artisan migrate

6. Fix permissions for storage directory:

   sudo chown -R ${USER}:www-data storage
   sudo chmod -R 755 storage bootstrap/cache
   cd storage/
   sudo find . -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;
   sudo find . -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;

Apache configuration (optional)

% cat /etc/apache2/sites-available/memoristudio.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName dev.memoristudio
    DocumentRoot "/path/to/memoristudio/public"
    <Directory "/path/to/memoristudio/public">
        AllowOverride all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Make the symbolic link:

% cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled && sudo ln -s ../sites-available/memoristudio.conf

Enable mod_rewrite and restart apache:

% sudo a2enmod rewrite && sudo service apache2 restart

Without apache custom configuration

Navigate to the root directory of the project and run:

% php artisan serve

and navigate to localhost:8000.

Setup DB

Laravel provides a simple yet powerful mechanism for creating the DB schema, called Migrations Simply run php artisan migrate to create the appropriate DB schema.

Add seed data to DB

Run php artisan db:seed in order to insert the starter data to the DB by using Laravel seeder

Building project

After cloning the project, create an .env file (should be a copy of .env.example), containing the information about your database name and credentials. After that, download all Laravel dependencies through Composer, by running

composer install

composer update

After all Laravel dependencies have been downloaded, it's time to download all Javascript libraries and dependencies. We achieve that by using nodejs and its package manager, npm.

A convenient way of installing multiple versions of nodejs and npm on a machine, is by installing and using Node Version Manager, nvm.

This project was built with the following nodejs and npm versions:

$ node -v
v14.18.1

$ npm -v
6.14.15

So, when in project root directory, and after npm has been installed correctly, run

npm install

To download and install all libraries and dependencies.

Compiling assets

This project uses Elixir which is a tool built on Gulp, a popular toolkit for automating painful or time-consuming tasks, like SASS compiling and js/css concatenation and minification.

To install gulp and gulp-cli (command line interface), please read this.

Then, when in project root directory, run gulp --local In order for the assets to compile. Also, by running gulp watch --local A watcher is set for when a file is changed to be compiled automatically.

Converting audio files to mpr with CBR (constant bit rate)

This project allows users to upload audio files. In order for the desktop application of Memor-i to operate correctly, these files need to me in .mp3 format and have a CBR (constant bit rate), not a VBR (variable bit rate) . See more This project converts uploaded audio files appropriately, on the fly. For this to happen, we use avconv library. To install this library in a Unix-based machine, check this post.

You can see and modify the command we use for coverting the files in public/convert_to_mp3.sh.

Converting image files to .ico files

This project includes special functionality to convert a game flavor cover image file into a .ico file, for usage when the game runs. In order to accomplish this, we use ImageMagick tool. ImageMagick can be installed like this: apt-get install imagemagick

Building Windows executables for game flavors

When an admin user publishes a game flavor, A .jar file is built for this game flavor. In addition, this application uses Launch4J in order to build also the windows executable and Inno setup to build the installer (version used: 5.5.9). The launch4J application is included in public/build_app/launch4j as a standalone application. Make sure you also install Wine on your server via WINE for Linux

When calling the innosetup script located in public/build_app/innosetup/iscc.sh we pass as a parameter the current system user. This user has to be set in .env file:

APP_LOG_LEVEL=debug
APP_URL=http://localhost
SYSTEM_USER=user
...

And have write access to /home directory.

Installing wine

• Setup a user where wine will be installed (non-system user), e.g. project_memori
• Run isccBaseSetup.sh in a shell allowing X server connections (Use e.g. ssh -X project_memori@myserver.gr to get such a shell) example: ./isccBaseSetup.sh ~/Downloads/innosetup-5.5.9.exe
• Change the owner of the user's .wine subdirectory to www-data (e.g. chown -R www-data /home/project_memori/.wine/)
• The user www-data can now run the iscc.sh script with the following arguments to package project_memori: the user name (eg project_memori) and the .iss script file path of the game flavor

Deploying

You can run either php artisan serve or set up a symbolic link to /path/to/project/public directory and navigate to http://localhost/{yourLinkName}

License

This project is open-sourced software licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Memor-i studio has been created by Science For You (SciFY), a Greek not-for-profit organization.

The Memor-i Studio project has been funded by Public Benefit Foundation John S. Latsis