Any plans for an "official" hosting server?

[Daynarr]

Many games will be much smaller then mega games. Actually Esben Mose Hansen had quite outdated PC to act as server for Dom2 and it hosted a good number of games at the same time. Todays PC's could easily handle up to 50 normal games (or even more) as they require only little resources. Memory is probably most important part for PC as CPU is used only for hosting.

Of course, all games should be run in text mode on the server as normal window eats a lot of resources.

[Graeme Dice]

Tim Brooks said:
Okay. We have questions for those who are 'in the know'...

1. How many games can be hosted by a dedicated server at one time?

I've hosted three games at once in graphical mode on my old 800 MHz PIII with 256 MB of RAM running windows 98 while still using it to play other games. Hosting only takes significant computer resources during turn processing in my experience.

2. How much bandwidth does this take?

I believe that it's only as much as is needed to transfer turn files.

It would be great if Shrapnel ran some kind of official server.

[Gandalf Parker]

I wonder if Dominions would have any problem hosting on a Windows NT server. It could still use scripts to start the games. And it might make management and cleanup easier.

[PhilD]

Basically, if we're talking PBEM games and not TCP, the server should not need any more resources to run X games than one - dom3 itself will not be running full time, just while hosting, and even if there are many games running in parallel the server can manage them and only run one instance of dom3 at a time (requires a bit more careful programming, not that terrible).

TCP games are a totally different matter, and the answer will depend a lot on how efficient memory management is in dom3. Will several instances share memory? this kind of question. But I'm not sure how useful a TCP-games server would be.

[Esben Mose Hansen]

I'm having fun writing a file-based (sort of email, but without the email bother) version of my server. It's progressing steadily, going faster as I get more comfortable with ruby and rails.

As for the number of games you can host, expect 256Mb per 5-8 games. RAM is about the only thing that matters. I could run 20 on the my 256Mb server, but that was with 700 Mb of swap.

For my new server version, I expect the number to be basically unlimited.

[DominionsFan]

Esben Mose Hansen said:
I'm having fun writing a file-based (sort of email, but without the email bother) version of my server. It's progressing steadily, going faster as I get more comfortable with ruby and rails.

As for the number of games you can host, expect 256Mb per 5-8 games. RAM is about the only thing that matters. I could run 20 on the my 256Mb server, but that was with 700 Mb of swap.

For my new server version, I expect the number to be basically unlimited.

wow, it seems that doms just dont need too many resources to run. A decent server could be hosted from a laptop with 1 GB of RAM easily. Hm actually I might make available my laptop as a server, since I don't use it too much anymore, and it is a good one with 1 GB RAM. If it will be needed I will make it available for sure.

[Arralen]

DominionsFan said:
Hm actually I might make available my laptop as a server, since I don't use it too much anymore, and it is a good one with 1 GB RAM. If it will be needed I will make it available for sure.

@Dominionsfan
That's a very nice and generous offer, but don't do that. Notebooks are not made to run 24/7, even less so than Desktop PC.

@everyone
But even a 5-year-old low-level server (P3, 0,5-1GB RAM, 10-20GB HDD space) should be able to run 25 TCP/IP games and a nearly unlimited number of email games, if the resolution of random maps is heavily restricted. Otherwise the random maps alone would eat up the disk space fast. Maybe there should be an option to save the map for later use?

And I know I'm repeating myself over and over, but if you're looking into email-hosting I would strongly suggest you check out the Stars! Autohost Site. Their autohoster is running for about 10 years now I guess, so their script can be considered pretty matured. And some years ago, when the game was more popular, they had several hundred games running simultaniously, not only the meagre 52 they have now.

[Tim Brooks]

Okay. That has answered some of my questions. Sounds doable then. The big thing is volunteers to administer it. We do not have the resources for that.

[Arralen]

Depends what you plan to use for the server.
My experience with Linux is limited to keeping a Suse6 server running for 3.5 years, using Webmin mostly and doing nothing even remotedly fancy
With WinNT and 2000 things look much better, but I must admit I havn't seen any 2003 server up to now ...

I would suggest to form a team from people all over the world anyhow, to have better chances that at least someone is available at any time. Wouldn't be that good if the "official" server is down for several hours just because a single instance of Dom is blocking everything for some reason.

[Graeme Dice]

PhilD said:
Basically, if we're talking PBEM games and not TCP, the server should not need any more resources to run X games than one - dom3 itself will not be running full time, just while hosting, and even if there are many games running in parallel the server can manage them and only run one instance of dom3 at a time (requires a bit more careful programming, not that terrible).

I had a couple of problems with temporary file collisions destroying games when I was running three Dom II servers at once. If multiple games were processing the turn at the same time, it was possible to end up with the units from one game being transposed into another. Atlantis ended up with their capital above water I believe.