Portability question

[jubehnka]

Hello all.

First I'd like to say how much I love this project. I'm not computer illiterate, but I'd never worked on anything server sided or database based. I had never heard of mariadb until working on this. I can play around with programs and I'm very familiar with the way ff11 works clientside. I also take a minimalist approach to the things I do, so if it's not needed to get it running I usually don't include it, that's why I don't run ashita and instead always loaded directly from xiboot. I also keep a barebones FFXI install on a portable drive along with a bat file to register the necessary dlls and a couple of reg files to add registry entries to get the base client to load portably.
I followed all the instructions on a windows 10 clean install and was able to get me a working build so far. Toyed around with a few values in the Lua files and it seems to be going ok.

My question has to do with portability. I want to be able to take the files compiled, load them up in an USB drive, and be able to launch the server from any pc. I thought I was able to isolate all the files needed to run the server (the xi_*.exe, the dlls in the build folder they depend on, I had to pull vcruntime140d and msvcp140d since it was as compiled in debug mode, and the following folders; log (I know this autogeneates on launch) losmeshes, navmeshes, res, scripts, settings) and isolated these files will launch the server just fine on the pc where they were built but on an identical machine where python, mariadb, and visual studio weren't installed I get (the application was unable too start correctly (0x000007b)). I know I'm missing something, do I really need to have python, mariadb, and vs installed? If not, how would I achieve portability? And where are the databases stored let's say I want to make them portable too, how would I go about that and it's it even possible.
Is the any plans for portability?
Sorry about the long post but I've been experimenting a lot and came up with a lot of questions.
Loving the project.

[EpicTaru]

You've ensured that the MariaDB / MySql service is also running?

[EpicTaru]

And for that specific error you're receiving, Google says that it can be resolved this way: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/solvedhow-fix-error-code-0x000007b/a8fed07e-30ea-4717-b961-b781053eff82

[zach2good]

You can use a program like this: https://www.dependencywalker.com/ to find out exactly what DLLs aren't available that the executable wants for startup - be it system, or local, etc.

[zach2good]

At this point, I would wholly recommend biting the bullet and using Ashita v4, if just to abstract away any registry edits using it's sandbox plugin.

Is the any plans for portability?

Not at all. We support a regular install of Windows and a regular install of Linux flavours like Ubuntu. It's too much effort and man hours for us to maintain the software for more configurations than that.

[cocosolos]

You do need mariadb installed, it holds all the mob and item info as well as character save data. You can't run the server without it, but you should be able to install it to be portable. Google "portable mariadb install" and it should give you some instructions. You'll want to have Python available for updating the database, but it's not necessary to run the server (yet?). VS is only required to compile the executables from the source code.