FTE - setup and deploy a dedicated server

[toneddu2000]

[Spike]

regarding manifests, if the 'game' setting isn't recognised, all that happens is that:
a: it won't populate the basegame values (if omitted).
b: it can't scan the windows registry to find an existing install (not relevant if the engine is run from the game's basedir anyway).
c: it won't give a fallback game name. You already specify an actual value for that anyway.
d: it won't give a fallback 'defaultexec' line. such things should be in your default.cfg anyway.
e: it probably won't give a protocolname fallback so your servers might get mixed with other servers in dpmaster server listings.
basically it doesn't really make a difference if the game is recognised or not, the engine recognising it just means you can omit stuff (like the entire default.fmf file), while not recognising it means you need to be more explicit.
you only need to edit the engine to change the icon or rebrand the 'FTE' stuff away completely, is the theory, anyway.

to compile fte, just download+install cygwin and do 'cd engine && make gl-rel FTE_TARGET=win32' and then run the binary in the engine/release dir or so.

-dedicated argument does not exist in dedicated quakeworld servers. an explicit number doesn't make sense when the server is limited to 32 players anyway.
if you want to override the player limit, maxclients will limit the number of players allowed on your server. maxspectators will limit the number of spectators allowed. sv_playerslots is the max players+spectators+bots possible (this is the only cvar of the 3 that needs a map change to take effect), empty will be 32 in deathmatch or coop is set, and 1 if not (ie: single player - but why would a dedicated server have deathmatch 0 set?).
spectators are generally better implemented in a different way nowadays.

regarding sprites:
sprites are not loaded in dedicated servers. it doesn't make sense for them to be loaded.
the server may attempt to load them if the setmodel builtin has been configured to use the real model sizes, or if hitmodel is used, but they shouldn't otherwise be needed.
vanilla quakeworld never loaded any spr or mdl models.

if your firewall (like the one built in to windows) is configured to refuse connections, then connecting to localhost like that can indeed fail.
the 'status' command on a server will list ALL addresses+ports that the server is trying to listen on (this does not include NAT remapping however).

what are you doing that's requiring such HUGE datagrams? spamming 50 huge messages every single frame or something? no wonder its laggy.
you will need to boost the rate+sv_maxrate settings if you're not going to reduce the spam.
again, use the status command to see how much bandwidth is actually being used.

[toneddu2000]

Thanks a lot Spike for your kind and quick reply!

regarding manifests: ok

regarding compiling: ok -I'm installing cygwin, let's see. I'm always thinking that a working Visual Studio 2012/2013 and CodeBlocks installation could be a lot better for Windows devs

regarding dedicated argument: ok, so.. no arguments! The wierd thing is that I changed sv_playerslots "4" in C:\Users\myuser\Documents\My Games\FTE QuakeWorld\fte\ftesrv.cfg but server keeps disconnect fisrt player when second player (second istance of fteglqw.exe ON THE SAME computer) connects. Could it be a network problem? Or there is a .cfgs hierarchy? Couldn't it be possible to use just one cfg? There are too many and I couldn't find a good guide about Quake cfgs (fte has even its own one!)

regarding sprites: ok, just curiosity

regarding firewall: this one is tricky. I tried even to shut down Windows Firewall, but sometimes server hangs up(I can't type input anymore in the server console when it happens), no matter if the firewall is on or off. In this cases, client (obviously) waits forever a connection. This freaks me a little out, because the availability of connection seems (I could have done lots of errors so I'm not 100% sure) a little unpredictable. And, for a commercial game, this is not an option.

regarding huge datagram: that was my fault. I used a quake id1 folder mixed with dp and fte stuff. One of them was the great "Quake Small Mod Compilation" by Seven. Maybe that was too big, I don't know. Again, that's not good too. For a commercial game I'd like to pump up graphics to make it look better but if network (even locally!) can't handle it.. I'm stuck! As I stated before, that could be a mess made by myself, so, for now, let's just forget what I said!

I'm stuck anyway with making (just for start) a simple test connection with 2 or more players with FTE and normal Quake. Where I'm wrong? Why server always kicks last player when another client approaches?

Thanks again Spike for your help

[Spike]

the qport cvar specifies some random number that persists over dodgy router reassignments (client is identified with qport+ip address instead of udp port+ip address).
its flagged CVAR_NOSAVE so shouldn't be saved into configs (but can still be read from them), so if you do perhaps have a dodgy old one from another (qw, maybe dp) engine, then yeah, the two clients will be seen as a single one, and one will get kicked when the new one joins.
just change the qport.

if all else fails, if you're prepared to support it, you can always set cl_splitscreen to get up to 4 players per client. this may require adding support to csqc (change VF_LPLAYER to select each client's view and draw that - the csqc has full control over the screen, so needs code to draw that stuff properly), probably in much the same way the engine supports it when csqc isn't active.

SMC is agressively spammy. No commercial game would be able to get away with that in a multiplayer environment. SMC can drop (dp's) framerates to 30fps even without rtlights thanks to all the particles even on a nice simple map like dm4. You can/should utilise csqc to reduce network bandwidth wasted on particles, its just that smc doesn't use any csqc at all.
set sv_maxrate(server) and rate(client) to 0 and rate limiting should be disabled, allowing you to spam to your heart's content. yay...

[toneddu2000]

[toneddu2000]

[revelator]

HOMEDIR i think is only relevant to linux builds it should not be used on windows unless you want FTE with cygwin linkage (would depend on the cygwin runtime then).
Could use MinGW64 with Msys2 which is targeted at windows by default, or Use my CB Advanced package which has all things you need allready.

[toneddu2000]

[Spike]

homedir used despite being disabled:
the filesystem code is initialised before the manifest file is parsed, this includes determining the home basedir.
this doesn't mean that it is actually being used, only where to put it if it is.
if you use the path command you will see whether or not the directory specified should be used or not.
you can also tell that its using the correct manifest because a client will say 'foo initialised' at startup, where 'foo' is specified in the manifest.

server crashing:
this appears to be an issue with dedicated servers and q3bsps. I'll fix this at some point.
if you suspect its triggered by a different mechanism, you can use 'make sv-dbg FTE_TARGET=win32' to build a debug server. any segfaults will then cause the engine to print a stacktrace somehow. you can run 'addr2line -e ftefoo.exe' and then paste the addresses, and this will show you the function names+lines where the crash is happening. if its outside gl_q2bsp.c then pm it or paste it to me on irc or something and I'll try to figure out what's causing it.

overzoomed:
set vid_conautoscale to 1 if you want to scale the UI 1:1 with physical pixels.
if it affects the game/hud and not the console, then blame any csqc that you're using.
if the game is zoomed weirdly but the hud is okay, then blame fov. try changing fov to 90. the default fov has been a little too high in the past (part of temporary psychological warfare against nquake users, the default is back to 90 now).
you can also use these commands to see which configs your client is actually executing, the result should include a system path:
flocate quake.rc
flocate default.cfg
flocate config.cfg
flocate fte.cfg
flocate autoexec.cfg
the last 3 of those are user-specific files. delete them to revert to factory defaults. the other configs are specific to your mod. if you're going standalone, you shouldn't need quake.rc

server hang ups:
this can often happen with dodgy QC that keeps on looping until it finds a usable spawn spot. it is an infinite loop in the QC code. adding more spawn spots to the map can help, as can tweaking the QC to allow gibbing other players on spawn. can also occur in other circumstances.
such QC-caused lockups will eventually hit a runaway loop detection and result in a stack trace, if left long enough.
QC-caused long-but-not-infinite loops can be debugged using 'profile_ssqc' or equivelent command, use it before and after the lockup and it should show which qc function ate all the time.

server listing:
I was quite specific when I said sans protocol name might mix the server with others in DPMASTER server listings. Yes, I weaseled out. The protocolname does what I said it does, but what I said does not exclude servers listed from other types of master server (namely, qw, q2, q3, etc, masters), of which there are quite a few masters and even more game servers. I still intend to fix this some time so that the others are disabled, its just that its a bit messy to do as things currently stand (resulting in annoying barriers when switching between nq/qw/dp servers).
I'll have to come up with something creative to prevent it from feeling like a regression to players.

[revelator]

[toneddu2000]

[revelator]

Yeah i had some problem also since the vs 2010 solution tried to open vs 2013 and convert the solution :S fix was rightclicking the solution and selecting vs 2010 to open it with.
Also these project files seem to be leftovers from an older release as they are missing items added later. Im updating them now and if it works i can upload the new project files for you.

[toneddu2000]

[Spike]

the 2005 project files are the best maintainted ones. I've a few private projects in there that I'm too lazy/selfish to share, so don't worry too much about missing projects.
a single person does not use multiple project files.

at one point it was possible to compile with msvc via the makefile, but that requires setting up more stuff (like gnu make), and debugging it isn't so straight forward.

errors about precompiled headers can be fixed by just completely disabling precompiled headers. its compiler performance hack rather than anything that is meant to affect the output. you might also have issues with missing symbols if I've added extra files later.

the networking stuff has greater isolation now.

support for ffov was disabled for a while as I wanted to rewrite how it worked. I reenabled it recently, but I'm still not happy with how it works (namely, how to interact with it via csqc+post processing shaders). if you had previously set a bad value, the new version actually supported it.

server lists are properly isolated now. the engine will not subscribe or query quakeworld master servers if the protocol name is set to something other than 'Quake' (same for q2+q3). So just set the protocol name to some custom value for your mod, and it shouldn't spam you with servers that you're not interested in.
also, q3bsps should no longer crash dedicated servers.

[toneddu2000]