[Cerebus]

Due to lack of dedicated servers and low game population I'd like to suggest when we host servers that maybe we put a launch time in the server title or something of the like.  There's rarely an open or even active server, so people go in, see none, and bail.  Or, when someone puts one up (me) I'm not going to sit waiting for an indefinite period for players that may not come.  I just had the idea to put the server go time up to keep players from joining and bailing right away, and to keep us unstuck from a server, I tend to get other things done while waiting and check to see if anyone's joined fairly frequently, we need to adapt around the current game population, I'd certainly like to be able to reliably jump into a multiplayer game (if we had dedicated servers up this probably wouldn't be an issue) 

[skunimatrix]

I'll call my cable company tomorrow and see what the colocation costs are.  I have a spare box here that could host a full time game server, but I'd have the roommates problem.  But if I use it for testing purposes for work as well I can write off the colo expenses (and one of my app servers do need to be "tested" on a windows envrioment so..."  Plus I just got back from my farms and it looks like we've had a bumber crop of rice and the soybeans look good as well with extremely high prices, so the rent check this year looks like it's going to be good. 

[skunimatrix]

Called the cable company and they don't really offer colocation services anymore.  (Apparently that's changed since the last time I inquired about a decade ago).  I'll shop around for a dedicated server.  How is the stand alone stability under linux or mac?  Anyone know?

[karajorma]

You don't really need a dedicated server to run a standalone. All you really need is a computer with internet access. In fact since the computer isn't doing any graphical tasks, the specs required are actually lower than those needed for a machine you actually want to play on.

Linux and Mac stability are non-existent since the standalone is PC only at the moment. It could probably be daemonised pretty easily but so far no Linux or Mac coders have turned up to do it.

[skunimatrix]

Tomorrow I'll play around since one of the deals I was working on fell through and see if I can't get port forwarding to work on the router to the rp5700 AND allow me to play from my laptop at the same time...

[jr2]

try portforward.com and look for the directions for your router.

[jg18]

Linux and Mac stability are non-existent since the standalone is PC only at the moment. It could probably be daemonised pretty easily but so far no Linux or Mac coders have turned up to do it.

I'm not sure what you mean by daemonize or how it would solve things. The standalone GUI is MFC, right? In which case, we'd need to port it to wxWidgets (or some other cross-platform GUI toolkit) to make it cross-platform, right?

As you may remember, we talked semi-recently about the wx standalone GUI port that Spicious made a few years back. If someone were able to get it working, tested, and cleaned up (if needed), that would work, right? I'd be interested in working on that, but I have no idea when I'd have the time...

EDIT: Although integrating the wx standalone GUI into the codebase would then require making a wxWidgets install available to the FSO build system. Well, IIRC OS X 10.5 and up (maybe even 10.4) ship with some version of wxWidgets pre-installed, so we might be able to use that, not sure. Presumably we'd still keep the MFC standalone GUI for Windows, though?

[karajorma]

Making wxWidgets a requirement was one of the main reasons I'd prefer to have the standalone made into a daemon rather than just porting the interface.

Although that might just be due to the ridiculous hoops I found myself having to jump through when I was trying to get wxLauncher to build.