Cortex is localized to it's own directory. The Cortex root directory contains sub-directories which each hold a specific piece of Cortex's functionality. The Windows and Linux versions of Cortex have many common directories in their structure. Specific differences between the two are described in the Windows and Linux specific chapters in this manual.

• bin: Custom binaries and scripts per OS that keep Cortex running. Most of the OS integration apps are located here.
• engines: Cortex places all engines it downloads from the update server here. These are fully functional game servers. Some of our customers manually run servers right out of the engines directory, though we don't recommend it especially if you plan on using instances.
• etc: Configuration files used by Cortex, notably the dbconfig.xml file, the mySQL config file, and the PHP ini file. The linux version of Cortex has it's Apache configuration file here.
• httpd: The Apache distribution running the web server that powers Cortex. This directory is a simple default Apache installation. Notable subdirectories are the logs which contain error and access logs to help diagnose page generation issues in Cortex.
• instances: All playable game instances are located here. Instances are groupd by directory by username then instance name. To account for nonstandard characters in usernames and instance names all non-alphanumeric characters are replaced with underscores and all characters are converted to lowercase in their respective directory names. For example, if the user "-=CTF|Bill=-" has an instance called "[CTF]Match" the instance directory name for it will be instances/__ctf_bill__/_ctf_match.
• mysql: The mySQL database server that stores all of Cortex's data. This is a standard mySQL installation.
• plugins: A place to store engine plugins.
• tmp: Used for PHP uploads in the scripts that control map and file uploading by the users and various other temporary file needs by the Cortex scripts.
• users: The home directories for you and your users' FTP sessions. The directory name follows the same naming convention as the instance name directories; all non-alphanumeric characters are converted to underscores and all characters are converted to lowercase.
• www: Contains the PHP files that Cortex serves. This is the DocumentRoot directory of the Cortex web server's configuration file. While you can put your own files in this directory for your own web serving purposes we recommend against it as it may break Cortex.