Dedicated Server under WineX 3

[Mike Esler]

Last night, I successfully played on a BF1942 server hosted on my Linux
machine, using the windows dedicated server and WineX 3 pre-release.

With 3 players and approx 29 bots on Battle of the Bulge, and I didn't
notice any lag.  I cranked max players up to 40, but I didn't see lag
until I got in a plane.  We played one map (desert map, small arena-like
map) with 2 planes, and noone lagged.

Interestingly, my server is a Duron 800 with 128MB or RAM.  The game
server (wine included) used as much as 100MB.   I was running the 2.4.20
kernel with preempt patches.  I had the wine process niced to -5.  System
load sometimes went to 2, but I never noticed server lag (minus plane
activity with 37 bots and 3 real clients.)

I'll probably try it at my LAN event just to see how well it handles 14 or
so players and 10 or so bots, even though I may have a dedicated windows
server on hand.  If/When I test my linux server, it will have been
upgraded to a 1.1Ghz T-bard and 512MB or RAM.

You have to have X or VNC installed to do this.  You must run the
DedicatedServer.exe from X.  Perhaps there is a way to run the Windows
server without a head?  You must also run higher than 8-bit color on your
X server :) (my server monitor only does 8-bit, which is why I had to use
VNC.)  It does work with 8-bit, but the server setup is all black and you
can't see what you're doing.  Don't let the vncclient stay running, as it
uses precious cycles.

Does anyone know how much more/less CPU intensive a human client is as
opposed to a bot?  I would think that a bot would be more memory/cpu
intensive than a human since it has much to do and much to store in RAM..
Could someone who has experience with 20 player servers state differences
between 20 bots and 20 real players?  I realize human clients need to
send/receive data from the server, but is it that much more/less work than
what a bot would require?


-- 

Mike Esler
mesler at themelee.org