as the title says. me and some freinds will be builing a games server for hosting online games 24/7. what do you recommend? we are looking at this from a budget point of view atm. the only limitation besides price is it needs to fit in a 1U server chassis game hosted will be along the lines of mohaa cod farcry CS:S and HL2: DM and mabe a combination of these
First off I hope you have a fair amount of cash on hand. It is very impractical to attempt to host those sorts of games for any significant quantity of people on anything less stable than a T1-or something with any less bandwidth. On the hardware aspect, you might want to rethink your strategy. Half Life online Games, from what I have read, are very CPU intensive. To be able to host a 36 player match it likely takes an Opteron or Xeon class processor to play effectively; not many machines can handle the number of I/O requests made by other players. In a normal budget range, youre probably able to afford something that its fairly low end for your chip. However, you probably could only host about 10-16 people in a match unless you shelled out the money for some very serious hardware. Long story short, unless youve got a load of money, making dedicated gaming servers for all those games is not going to be a plausible pursuit.
As Roto said, you need a lot of bandwidth - especially upload to keep pings low. HL2 has a killer physics engine which requires uber CPUs, especially DM beacuse youve got the grav guns in it. Ive seen major servers crawl because theyve got 20 people all using grav guns.
Maybe if you play with only a few people would a 2.8Ghz P4 with 512 megs of RAM be acceptable. But HL2 is a resource hog. IMO, unless youre willing to shell out like $500 a month for a T1 connection, it aint going to be happening - unless you dont mind people getting dropped from your DSL line
We run a cs:s sever and somtimes hl2:dm as well as cs 1.6 on a 1600 duron w/384mb ram and have no problems with 10v10 (lan, 8 bots) on cs:s... Slight lag but nothing major... thats not great pc specs but gives you a rough idea... HL2:dm, max we've done is 1v1 so no idea how it copes with more players... Net connection wise though, you'll need high-speed... get 1:1 ratio if you can, though data-center hostign should provide that no problems...
t1! your kidding witha 256kb/s upload we had 4 players with low pings <50 this weekend no probs so we had an 8 man match with 4 people on lan 4 on web. This was call of duty though maby Hl2 needs more bandwidth. But I imagian 24 players would need about 4mb/s upload to be rearly comfortable.
wow this thread just saved me alot of hassel i was planin gon runnning a server off a athlon 1.18gig with 256ram i figured it be good for me and a buddy to play sum agasint sum bots 5man teams sorta dealy but it sounds like it isnt possible to have a enjoyable expeirence with the computer i have here also does the in game creat a server even let other people join cuz me and a buddy of mine have not been able to connect to each others in game servers once or even see each other pop up on the friends list??
