[cod] server not showing in browsing list

[Joe Brown]

Daniel M. Temme wrote:

>On Tuesday 03 February 2004 14:20, Luke wrote:
>  
>
>>First, I follow your logic, Joe. But, that cant be how the
>>master server list works. If my server was only pinged by
>>the master server every two hours, then why is it that if
>>I terminate the server now and then use my in-game browser
>>two minutes later it doesnt show up? Apparently, their
>>must be more to the process than a two-hour list check.
>>    
>>
>
>I may be wrong but I think that the client would try to ping the server and 
>just not show it if it isn't running.
>

Right on Dan.  The client pings each address in the list recieved from 
the master.  If it doesn't recive a reply from that ping or "getinfo" 
command, the server isn't listed.  Thought I said that, though.

Heartbeats (or pings) go out, from game servers every so often (about 
once every 5 min.) to the master and the master also pings each server 
about once ever 5 min.  Not "only" once every 2 hours.  With q3 it takes 
about two hours to be dropped from the master's listing.

>>If we assume the issue is that it takes two hours for an
>>upgraded server to time out from the master server than
>>why is it that one of my servers shows up correctly, and
>>did so from the very minute I upgraded the server? It was
>>only down for less than 10 minutes while I installed the
>>patch..... and this was the same ammount of time that the
>>other COd server in question was down, and it didnt show
>>up for an entire day. When it did, the info was all wrong?
>>

Probably the one running on port 28960.  I have no idea why that one is 
special.  I guess 28960 is a magic number for CoD. :)

>Does anyone know what info is actually stored/used on the master servers? It 
>appears that all the filtering is happening client side so there really 
>wouldn't be much of a need to handle more then ip, maxplayers and maybe 
>gametype, OS and whether or not it's dedicated. This prolly is a moot issue 
>but I'm curious.
>

It's not too hard to figure out, just takes some patients and a packet 
sniffer.  I haven't updated recon http://recon.sourceforge.net to work 
with CoD...  It's written in the Python language using wxPython for the 
gui interface.  It is a game server browser for Q3.  I use it to watch 
CoD server status, but haven't udated it to work specifically with CoD.

I used a packet sniffer to figure out how Q3 talks to 
monster.idsoftware.com and deciphered the packets sent back and forth.

>>For instance, why are 90% of the server for many, many
>>players reporting that their pings are one (1) in the
>>in-game browser, even though they are reporting everthing
>>else properly? 
>>    
>>
>
>This has irritated me, too. Since I got the cable line I'm getting used to 
>pretty good pings but all the 1's really didn't seem right ;). And it was 
>actually quite a large ammount of servers showing up with that.
>
>Have a nice day
>  
>
I had problems with recon reporting pings of 1 also, at one time.  The 
problem occoured because some server somewhere was spitting out too many 
packets and I had made no plan for extra packets in the code.  The extra 
packets threw off the timing of anticipated packets.

I'm getting the itch to do some hacking in Python, so I might update 
recon to do CoD server browsing.