View source for Manifest Creation

This section is in regards to creating your very own Manifest so that others may connect to your public or private server, this guide assumes that you have, up to this point, have a working server that is public facing, whether through XAMPP or otherwise and are using the Self Installer.

There is a batch file in which you need in order to create your manifest, this section will guide you on the steps within that batch file when you first launch it.

Important information such as folder locations and commands are highlighted for ease of viewing and understandability.

Pre-requisites: 

* makemanifest.bat file is needed created by Callista, which you can download from here: https://git.ourodev.com/community/Batch_file_server_tools/-/blob/master/makemanifest.bat

Once you have downloaded the batch file, proceed to place it anywhere and launch it.

It will ask you questions based on where certain files are located and what information is available, I will list out the steps and their meaning as follows:

* What is the location of the client files? - This is the location of the client files that we assume you have downloaded from the Self Installer, its best to keep folders with as very little nesting and long names as possible as Windows and other programs really hate this, so for this example, lets use C:\coh for now, make sure the contents of those client files are in there to begin with.
* What is the name of the executable file you use? - This means the name of the exe within the client files, you can rename it if you wish, so for example lets call it Ouroboros.exe.
* What is your patchdir, e.g. SCoRE? - This just means where you would keep the directory of your pigg override files, so in the client files, there should be a folder called "ouro", you can rename this if you like, as long as you stick to the naming scheme and reference it in this manifest.
* What is the IP of your server? - This is important, if you have a domain set aside for this then you can use that, if it's just the IP of your server then.
* What is the IP/URL for your patch server? - If you are using the Self Installer with the pre-configured XAMPP, then this will be the path you are using to host your game files, it's important to host them somewhere in your XAMPP folder within htdocs directory, so let's navigate to '''C:\xampp\htdocs''' assuming that is where you have installed xampp and create a folder in there called "game", place all your client files in there, so what you would put in the field for this question is '''<nowiki>https://YOUR</nowiki> IP OR DOMAIN/public/game.'''
* What is the IP/URL for the page to appear on the launcher, e.g. <nowiki>http://myserver/home</nowiki>? - This is very simple, just place in your IP or domain name of your server.
* How do you want your server to be named on the list, e.g. My COH Server? - Call this however you want your server to be publicly viewed as, so if you server name is Aurora then you may call it that so others can visibly see the name of your server.

Once you have done all of these steps you should get an XML file generated wherever you have started the makemanifest.bat file, make sure to have all your information correct as one missing letter or typo can break access, make sure that your Router or Internet Provider has no DNS restrictions placed on you, you can usually check your Router if this is the case, it's rare, but worth pointing out.

The last step is to place your newly created manifest file somewhere where it can be accessed, anywhere in '''C:\xampp\htdocs\public''' is perfectly sufficient, now all there is to do is load up your browser and search for your manifest using '''<nowiki>https://YOUR</nowiki> IP OR DOMAIN/public/manifest.xml''', If you did this correctly then here it will generate a plain text file with a bunch of locations and file names, If not then you need to go back and check out any typos, errors or locations of your files, everything has to be perfect and located otherwise it breaks.

If all else fails and you running into issues, please join the Ourodev discord and ask for help there.