Email from SE 4 when new turns are ready?

[Ragnarok]

Dethgod74 said:
Hi Ragnarok,

I've been curious about that. We're running our own server, is the PBW a program we can buy?

If not, maybe we can get someone to write some thing like this for us. We'd still like to run our games on our own server.

Thanks for your time!

PBW is completely free. SE fans own the server and run the site for free (unless you want to donate to support to cause) for our benefit. All you need to do is sign up at the site and follow the instructions.

The code is not for sale, AFAIK. Ruatha, a fan that posted here for a long time, made an emergency backup script for if PBW ever went down. Someone around here probably has that available. It did the job but not nearly as efficient as PBW does.

Just out of curiosity...why do you want to continue running your own server if a free service is available?

[Dethgod74]

Hi Ragnarok,

To answer your curiosity question, I have a number of answers, in no particular order of importance.

1) I've always wanted to own and run my own gameservers. I've got the boxes lying around, doing nothing, so I decided to put one to work. I've also got the UPLOAD bandwidth that I need to do other gameservers, like 2142 or MechWarrior 4.

2) I've wanted to do my own gameserver so I could play RTS, FPS and TB games with my sons, who live in Virginia

3) Networking PCs and running servers has always fascinated me. I've been doing it since 1996 using Windows 95. My job as the lead analyst at Cameron's Helpdesk has us supporting over 10,000 users. I'd like to move into a different, more challenging field, like our LAN or WAN group, and I figured creating my own server and managing it can't hurt me training wise.

4) If something goes wrong, one of us in our gaming group (Eat Flaming Death Gaming Club, est. 1984) can fix the problem pretty quick, minimizing down time. We won't have to depend on someone else to get our game up and going again.

I hope this answers your question.

I'll give PBW a look for the group's sake. It could be they might want to go that route if PBW allows users to create private games.

Thanks again for your time Ragnarok

[Fyron]

All players have to be approved by the host to join a game. If you label the game as private, most people will respect your desires. You can also manually add players to a game. Thus, if you have a list of the players that you want to play with, you can simply add them after you create the game, then close it to new signups. I don't think there is a way to hide the game info page, but news and forums and such are hidden from the public by default. You can also set PBW to only display your email address to people in the same game as you, for additional privacy.

If you are interested in learning about LAN/WAN server maintenance and setup, there is no better way than to learn how to develop server applications for yourself.