The 1st online beta test during march-april was a semi success. Technically the WorldServer work well, there are only some rare and minor bug. But the problem was to meet other players. 40 account where created, but the players were rarely connected at the same time. there is also the problem of timestamp (europe, usa, australia, ...) and the distance (ping over continent isn't very good). In fact, except the test I've made with my friends, most of the beta tester have played alone.

For solving this problem I plan to improve some features before the next release (very near) :
- Add geographic and timestamp information in the player profile, freely viewvable by other people (optional).
- Use this forum for create dated events.
- Activate some WorldServer features or Quest (via XMLRules) at certain date/time, for incitate player to come during these periods.

Have you some other idea ? comments ?

PS for MrG : I'm sorry, but playing Quake from my France to your Australia will probably never be possible. But there is already some other australian players in the list.

I'm not sure how much you are planning to keep compatability with normal QW clients, if at all. but you may wish to look at some projects implementing low-latency patches.

There are a few people who have implemented patches to lower latency so that QW is playable with ~250ms ping times quite well - these work nicely cross-continentally. Most people in the US get ~90ms pings to the QSG server, whereas from australia I get ~230'ish.

Aftermoon is working on Q2. Part of the problem is the games being set up on desktop computers when a person happens to go on.. with dedicated servers and better bandwidth, cross-continent playing should be alright.

Yes, Aftermoon is working on Q2.
My 1st goal was to create a persistant world on a dedicated server. But the actual peer to peer approach is a good challenge with a lot of advantage : low cost, easily extensible, playable with AOL or a less connection all over the world, playable in a LAN party (only 1 PC need to be connected to the WorldServer for loading/saving data) ... The only constraint is that you must play with near friends (near ... a continent! )

cross-continent playing ... I don't think about it for a FPS. Take an example, Diablo II : Blizzard have lot of money and tons of server, and their game is playable with a 400ms ping. In spite of this, they have continental server (USA east, USA west, Europe, Asia ...).

The network performance will increase a lot in 0.3 version of my engine when I will launch a dedicated server in a separate thread (instead of the current loopback).

Trust me, the actual problem is more a "meeting" problem than a network performance problem.

PS : A side effect about the low cost of this approach is that the money I have initialy forecast for the dedicated server is available ... Happy Ender and QuakeSrc.org

Whatabout getting an IRC channel? or is there one? i've already had too much trouble getting in contact with players, mainly since i tried installing ICQ - big mistake (f*cked up my win98, so i havn't tried playing again. However, i thankfully still have another OS : Win2k, which i hope it wil work on). Anyways, I think i might be having difficulty with my firewall, and will have to setup the ports - perhaps you could tell me sum more info to help my setup the ports, ie are they UPD, TCP, IPX? anything else i should know. thanks However, i need to find out about mIRC channels for Coop Of Die, first. Thanks again. -{SK}Andy

There is currently no IRC channel, the current state of this project is more a technical demo than a really fun game, so players are not very numerous.
And I haven't already coded the schedule system for helping players to meet others.

But it will maybe change with the next release planned.
Like I've already said in my news page, I will turn the game into a "challenge mode" where you have only one LIFE ! You will loose your inventory and restart to base1 after each death !
I will probably manage a "season" system where the winner will be the player (dead or alive) who reach the higher level before the end date.
Frendly fire will be turned off and telefrag not counted for incitate coop playing.



I don't know a lot about firewall, and I currently don't have the time for writing a guide about how to launch a Quake2 server with a firewall.
But any info about this subject can be very useful, if somebody have a link, feel free to post it here.