Meridian 59

Meridian 59 v1.1, January, 2015 Andrew Kirmse and Chris Kirmse

Copyright 1994-2026 Andrew Kirmse and Chris Kirmse All rights reserved. Meridian is a registered trademark.

LICENSE

This project is distributed under a license that is described in the LICENSE file. The license does not cover the game content (artwork, rooms, audio, etc.), which are not included.

Note that "Meridian" is a registered trademark and you may not use it without our written permission.

The license requires that if you redistribute this code in any form, you must make the source code available, including any changes you make. We would love it if you would contribute your changes back to the original source so that everyone can benefit.

WHAT'S INCLUDED AND NOT INCLUDED

The source to the client, server, game code, Blakod compiler, room editor, and all associated tools are included. Audio is handled by OpenAL Soft, whose prebuilt binaries are included in external/.

BUILD INSTRUCTIONS

The code has been built successfully with Microsoft Visual Studio 2026 Community Edition, which you can download for free at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/

1. Make sure Visual Studio's binaries are in your path, e.g. by using the vcvars32.bat script that comes with Visual Studio.

2. Go to the top-level directory (the one that contains this README).

3. Type "nmake" to build debug versions, or "nmake RELEASE=1" to build release versions.

RUN INSTRUCTIONS

After building the code, a server install is available in the run\server directory. Type "blakserv.exe" in that directory to run the server.

A client install is available in the run\localclient directory. You will need to retrieve the artwork, rooms, and audio files from elsewhere and copy them into the resource subdirectory.

The first thing you'll probably want to do is create an admin account on the server so that you can log in. Go to the "Administration" tab on the server's interface and enter the command:

create account admin joe.smith password

(Don't use this default account name or password, or people will likely take over your server. You'll get back a message like "Created ACCOUNT 4".)

Then create a character slot on that account with

create admin 4

You'll now be able to log in with this account name and password. Be sure to "save game" from the server interface to save this new account.

You can point your local client at your local server by running the client (meridian.exe) with command line flags, like this:

meridian.exe /U:joe.smith /W:password /H:localhost /P:5959

RUNNING THE SERVER ON LINUX OR MAC

The server can be built on Linux or Mac with the following commands:

cd blakserv make -f makefile.linux

The blakserv.cfg file requires some manual changes to run on Linux.

THIRD-PARTY CODE

Meridian uses zlib, libpng, libarchive, and OpenAL Soft. zlib, libpng, and libarchive are built from source. OpenAL Soft is included as a prebuilt binary (LGPL; see external/openal-soft/ for license details). libarchive was configured via cmake with the following cmake environment variables set to use zlib:

ZLIB_INCLUDE_DIR points to the include directory ZLIB_LIBRARY points to lib/zlib.lib

CONTACT INFORMATION

You can contact us at meridian59.email@gmail.com. Our Web site is https://meridian59.com, where you can also read about the history of the game.