I understand where you are coming from. "Sandbox" however in computer terms generally means something as isolated as possible from the rest of the world, so I assumed you meant a local-only Shard - which btw is very necessary as age builders need it to test their ages in MOULa. And since age builders rarely want to re-create the dataserver each time they change their age, they should be able to just drop it into the dat folder of their client and test their age. That's the desired goal for my tutorial. Since it seems you are aiming for something different, it hardly makes sense for me to edit your tutorial to achieve that, so I guess I need to look for a new name
. I can use the parts that are still interesting though.
Once I am done, maybe you can make your tutorial shorter by using the "local isolated sandbox" as basis. To be honest, the wall of text that's your how-to is quite daunting, and I don't think it has to be that long. It's also unnecessary complicated occasionally.
For example where you are encrypting the authdata. It's not necessary to have the python files twice (and if I got you right, that's what you wrote), and one easy command can encrypt all the Python and SDL files at once (the age files don't need to be encrypted):
PlasmaCrypt droid -key 12...90 SDL/* Python/Python.pak
The shell you are using will automatically expand "SDL/*" to the names of all files in the SDL directory, and PlasmaCrypt will encrypt all the files it gets as parameter, not just the first one. Similar bash-scripting is possible for the actual dataserver - it should not be necessary to make any spreadsheets or long command lists manually, after all, we got a computer to let it to exactly that kind of boring and automated work
However I think dirtsand should encrypt these files in real-time, or maybe cache them, but definitely not require us to encrypt them ourselves. I will look into how this can be implement easiest.