Roam — Website

The marketing and download site for Roam, a free, source-available survival game by Preponderous Software where you explore a procedurally-generated 2D world and interact with your surroundings.

How these were captured: headless Chromium (Playwright) against the live site on 2026-10-18 at 1280×800 and 390×844; the GIF is a sequence of real screenshots of /play taken while WASD was held.

The site is a small Next.js + MUI app, built as a sibling of preponderous-dot-org and dansplugins-dot-com — same theme, color-mode toggle, chrome, and Docker/CI setup.

What's on it

• Home (/) — hero (with a "Play in browser" link to /play, and one world shown side by side in 2D and in 3D, linking to the 3D view at /play?view=3d), an at-a-glance feature grid, in-game screenshots, and a "how to play" panel (desktop, terminal/text mode, and in the browser).
• Download (/download) — an "Or play in browser" link to /play, platform cards linking to the latest GitHub release assets (Windows installer + portable zip, macOS .dmg, and run-from-source for Linux), and the same "how to play" panel as the home page.
• /version.json — {"version": "<version>"}, the package.json version this build was made from, sent with Cache-Control: no-store so a deploy can be checked by the version it reports.
• /sitemap.xml — every indexable page (SITEMAP_PATHS in utils/site.ts) at the production origin; public/robots.txt points crawlers at it.

The game's own art (icon, sprites, screenshots) lives in public/ and is shown on the site.

Getting started

npm install      # first time only (a lockfile is committed)
npm run dev      # http://localhost:3000

Scripts

Command	What it does
npm run dev	Start the dev server on port 3000
npm run build	Production build
npm run start	Serve the production build
npm run lint	ESLint (next lint)
npm test	Run the Vitest unit + component tests

Keeping downloads current

The download buttons point at a specific Roam release. When a new version ships, bump LATEST_VERSION in utils/site.ts — that one value drives every direct asset link. See CONFIG.md for the full content/config reference.

Deployment

Containerized like its sibling sites:

docker compose up --build   # serves on :3000

It is intended to deploy behind the Preponderous gateway nginx box alongside the other Preponderous sites, served at https://roam.preponderous.org (SITE_ORIGIN in utils/site.ts).

Usage reporting

When the server is given a trace key in USAGE_REPORTING_KEY, it reports one page-view event per HTML page it serves to trace, as the program roam-website, carrying the page's path (for example /download — never a query string or fragment) and the site version. Nothing about the visitor is sent: no IP address, user agent, cookie, session, account or referrer. No script is added to any page — the report is made by the server (Next.js middleware), so the key never reaches the browser — and crawlers, uptime monitors, prefetches, API calls, assets and 404s are not counted.

Every page view also carries a random installation ID for the server (the tag install), so trace can count installations of the site rather than raw events. It is a UUID made when the server first reports, derived from nothing about the server or any visitor. TRACE_INSTALL_ID, when set, is used as is; otherwise the client is pointed at $XDG_DATA_HOME/roam-website/trace-install-id (or ~/.local/share/roam-website/trace-install-id). The report is made from Next.js middleware, which runs in the Edge runtime and has no file system, so in practice the ID lives in memory for the life of the server process: each restart or redeploy counts as a new installation unless TRACE_INSTALL_ID is set. To reset it, restart the server or change TRACE_INSTALL_ID (or delete the file, where a runtime with file access created one). Every switch below also stops it: with reporting off no ID is made, read or written.

Reporting is off unless a key is set, and any of these turns it off:

• USAGE_REPORTING_ENABLED=false in the server's environment (also 0, no, off; case and surrounding space do not matter)
• TRACE_USAGE_REPORTING=off in the environment (also false, 0, no; shared by every program that reports to trace, and it wins over the setting above)
• DO_NOT_TRACK=1 in the environment (also true, yes; see consoledonottrack.com)
• leaving USAGE_REPORTING_KEY unset

USAGE_REPORTING_ENDPOINT sends the reports to a different trace server. On the first request its middleware sees (any path outside /_next/ and /api/ without a file extension), the server logs one line saying whether reporting is on and, if it is off, which switch turned it off. The only case with no line is a missing key with none of the other switches set, so a site that was never configured stays quiet. Details: https://github.com/Stephenson-Software/trace#usage-reporting

License

Preponderous Non-Commercial License.