Dedicated to serve you
We finally released the dedicated server apps for Medal of Honor, Spearhead and Breakthrough the other day. These are command-line apps that you can run from the OSX terminal to set up a server for those 3 games without the overhead of having to run the game itself and use up OpenGL and other intensive resources. In fact, if you were so inclined, you could set them up on an Xserve. Let's be honest - is there any better use of an Xserve than to run game servers? I think not. Virginia Tech, I'm looking at you.
Another cool thing you can do with these is to run a dedicated server on your Mac, then join that same server using the regular game client on the same Mac.
Keep an eye on Martin's Configulator site. He's been chomping at the bit for us to release these, so I'm glad we're finally able to oblige. His new GUI Configulator apps make setting up and administering MOHAA servers a breeze.
Note that they require the most recent Medal of Honor patches, since those contain new DLLs that are used by the dedicated server apps. You also need to take care to put the server apps in the same directory as the game apps, or they won't be able to find their data properly. If you're using the older MOHAA apps or the dedicated server is in the wrong location, you'll probably get lots of errors about an inability to load a DLL or find the game data.
If you're currently administering dedicated servers on Linux or Windows, I'd encourage you to take a look at switching over to OSX for these tasks. So strike another blow for the dominance of OSX as a server platform and give these a shot.
Comments
HUGE MOHAA 1.14a bugs:
./main/configs/unnamedsoldier.cfg is no longer loaded or saved AT ALL. Essentially all audio, video, and advanced video preferences, binds and aliases always revert to defaults upon launch because unnamedsoldier.cfg is just completely ignored now. My workaround: replace default.cfg with your own old unnamedsoldier.cfg from before 1.14a.
'~/Library/Preferences/MOHAA Preferences' seems to be superseded by '~/Library/Preferences/Spearhead Preferences'. I don't have Spearhead, just mohaa. Odd.
Game seems MUCH more laggy now. G4 Dual-450 with Radeon 9000 AGP pro.
On the plus side, the game has not crashed for me (yet).
Previously, the game would crash most often after using "Browse Internet Servers", but only during the gameplay for which I had connected to it using "Browse Internet Servers". As a workaround, I made it a habit to write down the server I wanted to connect to, then quit, then launch mohaa again and juut type in the address: Hardy ever crashed as often that way.
Going to reinstall and get back to plain old 1.14. :( Kudos to you Brad for all your work, thanks anyway. :( :( :( :( :(
Posted by: CarstenKlapp | November 8, 2004 04:50 PM
"./main/configs/unnamedsoldier.cfg is no longer loaded or saved AT ALL. Essentially all audio, video, and advanced video preferences, binds and aliases always revert to defaults upon launch because unnamedsoldier.cfg is just completely ignored now."
Actually, that's not entirely true. Only the settings that are duplicated in newconfig.cfg supercede your settings. I posted a workaround on IMG, but a "b" patch is forthcoming to address this.
"Game seems MUCH more laggy now. G4 Dual-450 with Radeon 9000 AGP pro."
Can you give me some numbers? I've benchmarked it here with some MP maps and both 1.14 and 1.14a are giving me roughly the same framerates.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | November 8, 2004 05:54 PM
Thanks Brad.
(For anyone else following this, I think I found the thread at):
http://www.insidemacgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17887
About the lagginess, I jumped the gun, I'm sorry. It was in multiplayer and could very well have been "normal." I haven't tried single player mode yet.
The laggyness I experienced came in spikes, and I didn't see anyone with a really high ping who could have been slowing things down. Now that I think about it, it probably has nothing to do with the update at all.
Posted by: CarstenKlapp | November 9, 2004 02:05 PM
Aha! So now it uses
~/Library/Application Support/MOHAA/main/configs/unnamedsoldier.cfg
instead of
/Applications/Medal of Honor/main/configs/
(Didn't see anything in the "MOHAA Version History.rtf" about that, so thanks for the post at IMG).
:)
Posted by: CarstenKlapp | November 9, 2004 02:11 PM
I should point out that the "b" patches for MOHAA, Spearhead and Breakthrough are now on MacGameFiles.com, and they fix the issue with newconfig.cfg always overriding settings in unnamedsoldier.cfg. (I snuck in a fix for the "Spearhead Preferences" bug you pointed out for MOHAA as well, Carsten.)
Posted by: Brad Oliver | November 9, 2004 07:14 PM
I knew that MOHAA single-player was already completely unplayable on my dual G4-450 (+Radeon AGP 9000 Pro), but at least internet multiplayer was playable. This is the only reason I play it on my Mac as opposed to the GameCube. On some of the larger levels like "The Bridge" / "Crossroads" I have already come to expect lower framerates in online multiplayer, such as 12fps or so (understandable for my modest system), but now after I have had a chance to test the latest update further, since upgrading to the latest patches even online multi-player seems unplayable now due to low frame rates on all of the servers which are are relatively close to me on the Internet, where I used to get acceptable frame rates (20-30). The strange thing is, with the latest patch installed, the framerate display looks about the same but I now have many huge lag spikes, and it seems to me the onscreen fps display of mohaa does not update quickly enough to really show these spikes.
Brad, do you know where I can still download any of the pre 1.14a patches on the internet? I can't find them at the IMG or Aspyr web sites anymore. I already performed a clean install in order to update to MOHAA_Spearhead_08Nov04, and I no longer have any of the previous updaters on my hard drive (STUPID, STUPID, STUPID me!) I would rather have the latest updater prior to 1.14a (with Gamespy crashes and occasional other crashes) than the very slow frame rates (and various bug fixes & enhancements) of the latest patcher (MOHAA_Spearhead_08Nov04.sit), but I can't find any of the previous patchers anymore. I realise my system is at the low end of the supported systems list but I'm anxious to get back to semi-playable framerates for online play.
Thank you, and Happy New Year!
carstenklapp@yahoo.ca
Posted by: CarstenKlapp | December 31, 2004 08:29 PM