Free Quake Server hosting for 6 Months from Quad Damage Servers

[peewee_RotA]

You could easily monetize wallfly to third-party provides to get them the recognition they need to be popular.

...

the question isn't "How am i going to provide some servers and break even like other gaming service providers", but rather "How am i going to build the largest gaming network and have other gaming service providers begging to be included." There is a big difference.

That would be awesome!

[The Happy Friar]

i agree with kren.z: getting wallfly on other providers would be awesome.    But the question is: would people be willing to pay for it?

[Whirlingdervish]

But the question is: would people be willing to pay for it?

I'd say yes.

The IRTDM servers benefit greatly in overall usage (player load) from being on the wallfly/goto network, and their admins benefit greatly from being able to track the server chat in nearly realtime using nothing more than irc.

We could have hosted them for cheaper, but chose to do it here due mostly to the availability of wallfly and access to the many other custom scripts and server resources that were written for and used on the TS servers.

They're worth every penny if you don't have all the time in the world to run your own q2 servers and design a bulletproof setup to do it.

[[BTF]Jehar]

Agreed - the wallfly scripts are one of the things that still makes gamers go "whoa" whenever it's brought up. It's some damn nice scripting, and it's proven to be stable, useful, and fun. I'd say that in looking for ways to set QDS apart, inter-game connectivity is definitely something to pursue.

[quadz]

You've designed and implemented some tools that allow me to discover and change servers effortlessly with just a simple command, and this is very valuable. Would i have known about/ or even played on TailGunners Italy servers had they not been on this system? I doubt it. Would p1's whale server be as popular as it is today without being on this system? probably not. If you're looking for business models they are right under your nose. You could easily monetize wallfly to third-party provides to get them the recognition they need to be popular. The possibility's are truly endless.

Indeed; I have thought along these lines... and one of the design goals of version "2.0" of our scripting system is to handle more games than just Quake 2, and to be more scalable.  This would be one of the over-abundant ongoing projects I alluded to....

There are a few snags, though.  GOTO in particular works because of features in Q2 (and Q2admin) like client stuff, and private messaging.

In games like Q3 and (presumably) Q4, the ability to stuff a connect command to a client no longer exists.  So that kind of neuters the GOTO command...

On the other hand, I do think I can still implement a helluva better admin console than most GSP's provide to their clients.  (What we have now for Q2 is pretty powerful... but it's not particularly user-friendly... so I have a version "2.0" of that in the works as well......)

So it's not that I haven't given any thought to all this, but... I must admit, the apparent lack of ability to implement a server-side GOTO for anything but Q2 and Q1 based games, has effectively dampened my enthusiasm at least a little... 

In any case - thanks for your feedback.

(Hell, I've even considered providing a client-side wrapper for opengl32.dll to provide fancier in-game menus than just the text-based GOTO... but that still doesn't solve the basic client stuff-connect limitation.)


Regards,

quadz

[The Happy Friar]

On the other hand, I do think I can still implement a helluva better admin console than most GSP's provide to their clients.  (What we have now for Q2 is pretty powerful... but it's not particularly user-friendly... so I have a version "2.0" of that in the works as well......)

Not sure what you mean for that.  You have an admin "mod" running on all the servers, a special version of the server, etc?

[quadz]

Not sure what you mean for that.  You have an admin "mod" running on all the servers, a special version of the server, etc?

Currently no server mod is required, as long as Q2admin is present on the server.

My admin system is able to run remotly, just using rcon and WallFly.

One or more admins can connect to a collaborative control room where the server status can be monitored, and queries to the player/IP database can be made, logfiles searched, rcon commands issued, etc.

In the current version, admins log in over telnet.  So the whole interface is text-based (ANSI colors and scrolling regions - exciting 1960's technology!)

Anyway, I initially wrote it in 2002, and it's grown sort of haphazardly since then... there's a learning curve for new admins, as the command set evolved in a way that is neither particularly consistent, nor well-documented.

For version "2.0" I plan to clean a lot of that up, and probably make it able to be accessed from a web page rather than having to download a free telnet client to use it.

But the current version, while quirky and not without flaws, is still a pretty capable tool.


Regards,

quadz

[The Happy Friar]

neat!  I'd say telnet isn't an issue for q1/2 admins as it's pretty much all console based anyway.  But for other games people could see that as a turn off.

[peewee_RotA]

There are a few snags, though.  GOTO in particular works because of features in Q2 (and Q2admin) like client stuff, and private messaging.

In games like Q3 and (presumably) Q4, the ability to stuff a connect command to a client no longer exists.  So that kind of neuters the GOTO command...

Is there no way to provide this functionality by modding something like the q4max project? I never bothered with the Quake4 SDK because at the time installing MSVC express edition meant stepping on the toes of MSVC6 which I was using for an existing project.

Beyond that, you're dealing with a games that have built in server browsers but yet the users still use things like Gamespy and XFire. Providing the same functionality through an additional program on the client side that runs in the background wouldn't be a stretch of the imagination or an unbelievable hassle for the clients.

I'm also sure that there's some existing server browser application out there, like xfire, that would be open source, or receptive enough to allow you to create a plug-in for their system.

[RailWolf]

Ah.. in-game browser vs GOTO is a good topic.. they are very similar but the speed of the goto system and it's functionality is way better than a menu drivin system imo.. just my preference i guess.. im a 'stare at the console' person.. so i  enjoy goto.

I've currently created us a custom mvdsv server binary for QuakeWorld that enables the Stuff command and the private messaging.. it's just a matter of getting wallfly and the system itself adapted to quakeworld....  The stuff command i ported from r1ch's r1q2, and the pm system is something xavior worked on. QuakeWorld is the most likely candidate for having full WallFly/goto capability :0

Quake3 is unable to have goto like quadz said.. and im not sure if there could be an adapted version of it or not. Say instead of having an actual command 'goto [server]' ... maybe when you just type goto it'll list the servers in the db list and provide the ip addess next to it so you can connent?  meh..

Quake4 seems possible... Talking with AnthonyJ (Project leader of Q4Max) he says the stuff and pm system is availabe, but whether or not the client sanitizes stuff commands like the q3 is unknown. Quake3 Client only allows certain commands to be stuffed... and 'connect' is not one of them :/ Hopefully when we have some more time we can dig around more in the q4 client source and find out

[reaper]

goto is one of the best features.  when I'm in the game, I see other programs can take over quakes display.  maybe another client could be started that would implement goto, and then start your game?

[reaper]

It seems like you will need a lot of volume, since you are only getting 6bucks a month.

I hope you get it, and gl!

[Whirlingdervish]

reaper, I think a 3rd party app that linked itself into your opengl would work pretty well for a goto menu, kinda like how xfire in-game chat does it.

getting it to drop your old connection (stop the client) and reconnect to another server, would be quite a hurdle tho..

[peewee_RotA]

Quake4 seems possible... Talking with AnthonyJ (Project leader of Q4Max) he says the stuff and pm system is availabe, but whether or not the client sanitizes stuff commands like the q3 is unknown. Quake3 Client only allows certain commands to be stuffed... and 'connect' is not one of them :/ Hopefully when we have some more time we can dig around more in the q4 client source and find out

What I'm suggesting is having goto be a client side command via modding the client through some sort of plug-in. Wallfly would just be some sort of DNS server. So if you type some sort of "listservers" command then wallfly will send the most up to date information about each server back to the player. (either via a private message, or some add-on in the plugin that echos it to the console locally). Then the "goto" command does a similar look up with wallfly. Wallfly returns the ip, then the plugin calls connect locally.

Stand alone server browsers like Xfire can accomplish similar tasks. So a player messages "goto" in chat. Wallfly sees the player name, looks up his IP, and sends a command to the stand alone server browser at that same IP. The stand alone server browser then works it's magic by either closing the game and reopening it specifying the IP, or by sending it via some sort of command line if that game supports that kind of an API.

*edit*
There are also other features of Wallfly that are worth their weight in gold. For example !invite broadcasting the server IP along with the message, a command similar to goto that sends server information, ip addresses, and player counts of all of the servers in the list, and mymap should all be possible.

[peewee_RotA]

does this mean ROTA Mods is going to be back up? 

Tentatively YES!

69.162.108.68:27910

I still have to work out uploading a mod and getting it added to goto. For now it's standard DM with my custom maps.