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Servers at the release of Renegade-X


Ban4life

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I posted this question before in the FAQ, but no one has answered it. So this is a new approach.

I'm wondering how the game servers will start at the beginning of the game. The dev's have obviously thought about it, as they had contact with the studio that was creating C&C 2. They probably found a substitute or something for it, but I wonder if it's enough. The Black Down download figures raised into the hundreds of thousands of downloads. With all the recent coverage, it might be much higher for Renegade-X. All people wanting to play on the internet. With the release, will there be enough game servers? If not, how will you add more in time, before you lose a lot of potential fanbase? If there are 2000 people playing on servers and another 8000 that can't, it's bad for the image of the game.

Now I don't need a whole explanation, as the dev's probably don't want to give a whole explanation about how they arranged it. I just want to know if they have an adequate failsafe to prevent the loss of so many good players that would give the game full servers all day.

A yes or no will do =)

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I'm sure it's a standard procedure to send the setup file to pre-arranged mirrors and servers few days before the official release, and let all of those sources publish the file at the same time. Can use torrents as well.

You should be worried whether there will be enough dedicated game servers to play in..

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I'm sure it's a standard procedure to send the setup file to pre-arranged mirrors and servers few days before the official release, and let all of those sources publish the file at the same time. Can use torrents as well.

You should be worried whether there will be enough dedicated game servers to play in..

That's what I mean. Sorry if it wasn't clear. I meant game servers. I'll edit it.

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If I were a server owner I'd have no idea what to do if I wanted to host a dedicated Ren X server. I assume this information will be released sometime before Feb 26 though.

I'm more worried about the central hosting going down, that keeps track of all the servers and players (like XWIS in the original Ren). Because if that can't hold up then it doesn't matter how many servers there are at launch.

Plan C: Even a non-dedicated server can host smaller sized games.

Plan D: There's always offline mode with bots.

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Some places will host 10 servers. Jelly and RenCorner and long standing old Renegade communities will damn sure find a way to.

Possibly won't be enough. The servers aren't ran by the non-profit development team, it isn't their fault.

However, they aren't causing a limit to servers either. Server files are open. Anyone can have them release date. Possibly before if you ask.

If there aren't enough servers, Jelly will rub their hands together and open 10 more if they need, they used to run a lot of servers in old Renegade back when the playerbase populated the servers gladly. I am not Jelly, yet I believe they would be more than happy to host as much as people want to play as then they could have a huge community. They would find anyone they know who can run a server off one of their unused spare computers.

Which, mind you, anyone can do. Any computer can host a server. Some fairly expensive gaming rigs that can run Planetside2 at highest graphics can probably run a server AND play on it if someone felt like it.

Theoretically, your friend with a laptop and desktop can host on one and play on the other, with you and eager random players wanting to play, if there were no open servers on release. Consider that the last ditch possibility. If that is a scenario you can do, then technically you will be ensured you can play on release date.

Don't worry about the servers. Not only EA can make them. In this case, the devs have no interest making servers (besides one for their internal dev-build test group)

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There's currently 14 servers up (including 2 official beta ones - meaning supported directly by the developers). There's a max of 64 playercount in any given server. What they choose to set this at is their own decision though. Some will be for clanwars only, and others will be small games, but the majority will likely be bigger sized games.

If you wish to setup a server, I suggest waiting for the guide to be released on how to do this. I am not yet sure if this will be private (meaning apllication /approval needed) or public access.

The 14 servers are by no means the final amount for the launch though. Jelly has not yet set one up, along with several other communities as well. Don't worry - the devs and server owners are doing their best to make it a successful launch :)

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I also have confirmed, if the servers are all full at release, I have asked my Clan leader, and he says he can have our server box(es) host server or servers, and especially so if I pledge to ye ol' paypal...

...but to be honest, I have an agenda. The agenda is, if the game is that packed, and people don't have a choice where they play, then I can host a server and bring some Planetside 2 players in to try it (giving it more Realm members in it at different hours of the day), and we can all advertize for players to apply to our clan. I would do it if it meant building the clan. That's my agenda. So that's an additional server, at my ulterior motive to doing so. It is what it is.

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Anyone know how the server listings will work?

I hope it's not like the original Ren where it was listed by the player name of the server, so Jelly was A00 so it would be listed first. This made no sense at all.

P.S. Anyone know who owns A0?

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Hopefully, it is listed by default by playercount.

Then it is listed by server name.

Technically, there is no player name possible for servers in this game. It would be the server name outright I believe. Unless there is a field for "host name". In which case, I think you could enter "anything" as that host name. Possibly even the same name for multiple servers, which defeats the purpose because everyone would name A or 1 or 0 or whatever is listed on top and nobody would know where any of this jazz is coming from.

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Well I'm still worried. If I look at the Black Dawn unofficial download numbers after 9 days (viewtopic.php?f=13&t=9209&hilit=unofficial+black+dawn), they have easily over 65000 downloads. This might include multiple downloads and testing which download server is the best. Still, it's an incredible number for 9 days. Especially with the low media coverage at that time for a small single player campaign. These are by the way the only numbers they could track with a some reliability according to the thread, so the actual download number is probably higher.

So imagine we have 10 communities who all place 10 full game servers. This equals 10*10*64=6400 players able to play. With the Black Dawn download numbers in hand, we can see that we need not a hundred servers, but probably around 800-900 servers (assuming some double downloads and not everyone playing at the same time). This rough estimate is for the first few days only, as a lot of players will stop for various reasons. Even so, the player number will stay quite high for a while if we have enough servers.

With the recent coverage of many big and small sites and magazines, there might be a much larger potential players than Black Dawn. Black Dawn wasn't so much in the media as Renegade-X is now. Renegade-X also fills the hole that C&C left a tiny bit, so that might also increase the numbers.

I do realize that I'm wondering about worst case scenario's in download numbers and people wanting to play, but it doesn't seem such a long shot in my opinion. Do we really have a 100 communities? Now I'm wondering if we can reach 200 64player servers to wreak Havoc on. Let alone 500+....

I just want such a big player base we can last for many years. New players means fresh tactics and a renewed community. We can only win if we have enough potential servers in case the amount of players is absurdly high.

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Jelly will be hosting a server. Their server box has the capability to host a few servers. No community will likely be hosting 10 servers...that's just too high. I think your estimates are far too high, ban. Realistically, the number should be drastically lower than that in the first few weeks.

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Really, this game is wide open, just barely not quite considered open source but it is completely free and comes with servers for players to host themselves and are not highly intensive.

That being said, communities could actually host 10. Jelly will probably start with 3, in my opinion they will blow straight past that and in that scenario they will probably rally every spare computer they can convince to run a server on.

If the servers are all overpopulated on release, my clan will host one just to recruit through it (with the benefit of hosting games players desperately may need).

Any extra population not able to get into the community-affiliated servers, will always have the very possible ability to host their own. Most people in this day and age own 1.5 computers. That means every other person owns 2. They can run a server off one, and a game off the other. Some people own computers that can host a few servers. Some people own computers that can host a game and run the game along with it.

Heard of BYOB? This game might end up being BYOS, bring your own server. No worries, that isn't as bad as SimCity where you can't just magically a server so either EA pulls their act together or you just don't get to play.

Generally, I am not worried. I just hope it is as big a number as it can be. Not to ensure large and longterm player population. Just to get hype up. Honestly, a game as free as this and as good as this is guranteed to get some players some of the time for what one can concieve to be "forever".

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No community will realistically host 10 servers. It does cost money, and bandwidth is limited. This is the reason communities that host dedicated servers require donations to stay alive.

In Renegade, any free dedicated server was extremely limited on bandwidth and player count capability.

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So much speculation going around in this thread.

In the words of the Red Alert 1 Albert Einstein, "Time will tell. Sooner or later... time will tell..."

Look at it this way, there are two possibilities:

1. Renegade X defies all download expectations and becomes insanely popular.

2. Renegade X is not as popular as expected, but at least you'll always be able to find a good server.

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well, yeah. still, i have absolutely no idea how many people are going to play this at one time. right now i think we should easily be able to get about 1000-2000 players at a time. as popular as this game is within communites which actually know about this game, i have so far met not one person who knew of this game who played C&C Renegade before. and i've asked about anyone i knew so far. so... get the word spreading guys! :D

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I have a dedicate box this is completely dedicated to RenCorner's Renegade X servers. I currently have 2 servers up on it, but depending on need I can probably get 10-15 servers running. I am under the impression there will be a lot of places wanting to host servers up, but I have no problem hosting a few extra servers at the start to help accommodate the new players :).

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I share Ban4life's fear.

The only good recorded numbers were from one page alone, not counting several mirrors set up by others.

If we just assume it's 65.000 legitimate non-double downloads, so the other mirrors just fill in the mistakes that might occur during a download. We still have 65.000 people willing to play the game spread out over the day.

Let's assume it's as positive as possible, and you spread it over America, Europe and Asia evenly, taking a unified 'rush hour' for each. This would result in 21,667 players during rush hour,

Let's assume further, not all will be playing during rush hour, this rush hour is spread out over a larger area of the day since we are talking of 3 very large and distinct continents. So let's just say it's 1/3 of the players per continent that downloaded the game that play during the rush hour. The other 2/3rds per continent play on different hours of the day and don't come to the peak of rush hour.

This means that we still have, on 3 seperate occasions of one day NOT counting the 2/3rds of the other continents that has a few players playing then, you have 7222 players online during Rush hour in one continent alone.

This means we need at least 112+ servers with the maximum 64 player limit to accomodate them all during Rush hour.

Just as a reminder: I have made estimates that I tried to put severely on the safe side. I discounted all the downloads on mirrors and I divided this by 1/3rd (spread it out over continents) and said only 1/3rd of THAT number was actually playing at the busiest time, discounting anyone playing during the day on another continent, which also increases in the weekends...

Yours sincerely,

Demigan.

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We will be hosting 4 servers total on release of Renegade-X.

System specs: Xeon E3 1270 3.4Ghz, 16GB RAM, 1Gbps

All will be 64 Players:

[uS]Ren-X.com Slaughterhouse #1 (69.162.64.92 / us.ren-x.com)

[FR]Ren-X.com Slaughterhouse #2 (62.210.180.95 / fr.ren-x.com)

[NL]Ren-X.com Slaughterhouse #3 (5.79.67.131 / nl.ren-x.com)

[NL]Ren-X.com Slaughterhouse #4 (5.79.67.179 / nl2.ren-x.com)

See our website at http://www.ren-x.com :)

PS: We are currently already pre-scouting for moderators to look after the servers a bit, see requirements in my post at:

http://multiplayerforums.com/index.php? ... -to-knows/

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If we just assume it's 65.000 legitimate non-double downloads, so the other mirrors just fill in the mistakes that might occur during a download. We still have 65.000 people willing to play the game spread out over the day.

Let's assume it's as positive as possible, and you spread it over America, Europe and Asia evenly, taking a unified 'rush hour' for each. This would result in 21,667 players during rush hour,

If I remember correctly the download numbers for Black Dawn were heavily skewed towards much more downloads from Asia. So lets pray they setup their own servers.

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If we just assume it's 65.000 legitimate non-double downloads, so the other mirrors just fill in the mistakes that might occur during a download. We still have 65.000 people willing to play the game spread out over the day.

Let's assume it's as positive as possible, and you spread it over America, Europe and Asia evenly, taking a unified 'rush hour' for each. This would result in 21,667 players during rush hour,

If I remember correctly the download numbers for Black Dawn were heavily skewed towards much more downloads from Asia. So lets pray they setup their own servers.

They probably will. But from what I heard there were several mirrors specifically for the US and EU, and a few mirrors made by and for Asia. They are likely to host their own servers, but it still means that the US and EU actual download numbers are probably higher then the 65.000 downloads on the site, which contain a few double-downloads but most will be legitimate.

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I can ask Crimson over at n00bstories about hosting. She hosted renegade servers in the past. I don't know if she was even made aware of this project or not.

-_-

No further comment

Am I missing something here?

Noobstories was a popular server back in the day and I heard it shut down recently due to inactivity.

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Stay on topic please. It's very rude to just bash on someone who can't defend him/herself. This does not add to a good community.

Anyway it is nice to know that there are some good considerations made by the communities. If it will be enough... time will tell. In the end, time will always tell.

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I think I speak for all the server owners when I say if we consistently have full servers, we'll do anything and everything we can do to put up more. We all want this game to succeed, and, barring any major issues at launch, will do what we can to make sure it is. I personally will make my machine available for servers, if needed. To quote Scruffy, "Don't worry about it."

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Don't worry about lack of game servers. We can throw up 100 game servers if there was actual demand for it. We can give clan leaders their own game servers to manage if there isn't enough game servers around. We have the servers, the bandwidth, the facilities, and much more to ensure everyone gets to play!

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Well that's very reassuring. But where does the money come from?

As you already know, RenX is a team of volunteer individuals who have other jobs/careers. My career is in the I.T. field where we have cabinets, servers, and networks all over the world. With access to so much bandwidth and hardware, wouldn't be hard to supply the demand for this game.

One of our plans is to create a game server in a cloud infrastructure environment, then create a snapshot/template of that cloud server. If game server 1 fills up, we can use the template and spin up additional gameservers to keep up with demand. Along with that, there has been a lot of community involvement where they would like to provide game servers as well.

I bet if there is sufficient demand, there will be individuals (not us) creating more game servers. It's just like any other game, people will fill the need of game servers if there are gamers who want to play on it. :D

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Yes, we have had some big games. And yes, IMO it was less enjoyable. The maps aren't really made for this player count, just like Ren was. But hey, on Ren some also did it. So...

Well, in renegade (even today) I tend to avoid anything less than 40 players <-<

Maps in Renegade X are bigger and I'd expect 64 players to work.

The only thing I don't like about big player count is that the vehicle limit is not very well designed (even in Renegade X). Just buying a Buggy to get somewhere fast makes you feel like an asshole because you could be blocking someone else's.

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