Dedicated server software

[nocturne]

Geez... this went from a rather interesting exchange of various thoughts, to an outright argument, to a one-sided flame war all too quickly... Perhaps there's just better moderation on TM-Forum, hehe.

Anyways, just a few comments...

Aseco(the user)=Flo=Florian Schnell, the original author of FAST, Aseco v.~/v.6x (basis of xaseco), Aseco v1.x (basis of mistral aseco), and Aseco v2.x. AM/AssemblerManiac is Brad Matee, author of RASP and current maintainer of the Aseco v2.x.

Glad to see you back around the scene, Flo. Surprised AM isn't around -- must not have gotten the message, hehe.

Gekko... decent coder or not (respect but hate your work, hehe), you're getting a bit 'out there'... Suggestion of a lobby/room multiplayer format is just pure craziness -- it's been tried in plenty of games and has failed miserably in anything other than consoles.

And so what if servers are empty..? If a server op wants to waste their resources on an empty server, that's purely their decision -- it hardly hurts the game at all. I run 7 servers (one still in tmn), of which 5 are almost always empty. The 0-50k track testing server is one I expect to almost always be empty, but sometimes I'm amazed to see it bursting up to 20-30 players at any random moment.

Three years ago I was lucky enough to be managing the most popular TM server (based on polling Nadeo's serverlist xml output), without much concentration at all on managing a community. Since then, we've taken a bottom rung, purely due to my inability to expand on the experience brought to my players. Given unlimitted time and effort, I may be able to rectify the situation, but otherwise the shortcomings are all too obvious and tell me what I need to do. Point being -- it takes work, and the work certainly pays off.

As far as the discussion about server software goes, the question is all too sophomoric. How can you expect anything other than the industry standard -- dedicated server software for windows and *nix, both with a rpc interface allowing for external controllers. C'mon.. it's not like they haven't done this before, hehe.

In the end, I trust Nadeo to take a well-guided approach to the server side of things -- mostly, leaving it to the community to pick up the slack and create new experiences as needed. My only hope is that they keep to the old 'nations' gimmick to draw players -- otherwise I can just imagine this great community withering away into nothing.