EMPDUMP(6)

📦 version 4.4.1, in nixpkgs unstable

💅 EMPDUMP — like, the Empire game state exporter/importer, bestie

okay so picture this: it's a section 6 page from the Games Manual, and its whole personality is moving Empire game state in and out as plain text. That's the vibe. 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

empdump [-chmnvx] [-e configfile] [-i dump-file]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

empdump exports and imports game state as plain text. That's it, that's the whole gig. Clean, texty, iconic. 💖

🦋 OPTIONS 🦋

  • -c — use the complete export format, meaning it does not omit data that import doesn't need. nothing gets ghosted. ✨
  • -e configfile — use the game configuration found in configfile.
  • -h — help! prints brief usage info and dips out. 🫶
  • -i dump-file — import from dump-file.
  • -m — use the machine-readable format for export. and ngl, import always recognizes both machine-readable and human-readable format, so you literally can't mess that up. 💅
  • -n — dry run: don't actually update game state on import. it's giving "look but don't touch". 👀
  • -v — print version info and exit.
  • -x — export game state to standard output.

💀 LIMITATIONS 💀

real talk, empdump has some stuff it simply can't export, and we're listing all of it because we don't do half-info here:

  • player bmaps
  • power report
  • telegrams
  • announcements
  • message of the day
  • no-login message
  • log files

also, exported floating-point values may be inexact. 😭

and importing an exported game state may not result in identical data files. besides that loss of floating-point precision we just mentioned, coordinates get normalized, and characters beyond a string's terminating zero in a character array are lost. so yeah — close, but not a perfect copy. no cap.

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

emp_server(6) — go say hi to the server page too, bestie. 🧚

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Markus Armbruster <armbru@pond.sub.org> — the main character who wrote this, we stan. 💜

aaand that's the page! comes to you from the Games Manual, filed under <rainbow>EMPDUMP(6)</rainbow> with EMPDUMP(6) at the top and EMPDUMP(6) in the footer, and the footer date on this one is just the page name doing its little encore. periodt. 💅✨

📦 where this page comes from