Game Servers (generic)
Contents |
About
Game server software is what is used to host multiplayer video games either over the internet, on on a LAN. Some game server scale up to 100+ players if you have the bandwidth to handle it.
System Requirements
There's actually no hard and fast rule for system requirements to host a game server. Basically, you want a very fast processor (2.0GHz and faster), no less then 1 gigabyte of ram, and depending on what game you're serving hard drive space needs can range anywhere from 1 gigabyte for a stock install of Counter-Strike v1.6, to well over 4 gigabytes for a stock install of Team Fortress 2.
Bandwidth requirements vary wildly, again depending on the game. For instance, a home user can easily host a 4 player Left 4 Dead server on their home connection, but to run a 64 player Battlefield 2 server, assuming each player gets 10 kilobytes of data a second, that would require a connection of over 5 megabits a second (over 640 kilobytes a second). A home user usually has either a 512 or 768 kilobit uplink (64 & 96 kilobytes a second, respectively).
Rent Your Own
There are literally hundreds of GSP's (Game Server Providers) to rent a game server from. Price vary, and generally are sold on a per player slot solution. Some GSP's charge extra for different processors, more ram, more hard drive space (needed if you want to customize your game server in any way) or even including a voice chat server, where as others just charge you strictly by how many players you wish to have on your server.
Host Your Own
Have the home connection to handle multiple players, and the burning desire to just do it yourself? Most games available today make a dedicated server available to download, able to run in either a Windows or some time of Linux/Unix/FreeBSD environment. Below is a list of games with links to their dedicated server downloads, however it is not a definitive list, as there are literally thousands of games available for people to play.
- Battlefield 2
- Windows http://largedownloads.ea.com/pub/patches/BF2/1.41/Battlefield_2_Server.exe
- Linux http://www.mai-hawaii.com/linux-bf2/bf2-linuxded-1.1.2965-797.0-installer.sh (EA isn't hosting the latest version of the Linux server on their website for some reason)
- Valve Half-Life Dedicated Server and Source Dedicated Server (HLDS & SRCDS, respectively)
- Call of Duty 4
- Windows (included with the game on the CD)
- Linux - coming soon - requires most of the game files to be uploaded to the game server
- More to come!!!!!
--Banana 07:28, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
- This page was last modified on 31 July 2009, at 07:29.
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