From: ninja@halcyon.com (Jonathan Roy)
Subject: Re: Running a game, and all that.
Organization: The 23:00 News and Mail Service
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 18:07:35 GMT

vaitkus@lexmark.com (Keith Vaitkus) writes:

 - This is cruel and unusual punishment! Posting the FAQ when there
 - are no games starting!

Yes it is, isn't it? :) Maybe the next FAQ will take various
GB 5.2 stuff into account.. Not all of the current FAQ information
is still up to date. :)

 - I was very much looking forward to Feep's World -- It was to be my
 - triumphant return to gb. Alas, all did not go according to plan. So
 - now, off to make new plans....

I was really looking forward to it as well. Feep added all sorts
of cool code.. like Generals & Governors. Ahh. It felt so nice. :)

 - I wanted to post this e-gram to spur some discussion about the
 - trials and tribulations of running gb games. There seemed to be
 - more games running a year ago, at least it seemed so to me.

This also really annoys me. Last year I only had a email account,
and a very unstable, come-and-go Inet account. I couldn't really
play in any GB games, although they were everyplace. :) Now that
I have a full Inet account, there's no games. :( (Except for HAp, but
it's over seas, ie: no throughput, and I didn't enter a race
their.) I hope Feep's game is back soon, although I hate what has
been done to the planets in teh GB 5.2 planet code. :(

 - Are people having a harder time getting permissions to run games?
 - What sort of problems come up later?  Are people starting games,
 - only to get canned by some "higher up" that finds out later (or
 - changes his/her mind) and squashes this cyber-space rebellion?
 - "Games are fun -- and therefore cannot be (a) a serious activity
 - and (b) must be a waste of $$".

There seems to be an ample supply of gods around, so it must be that
there aren't as many sites willing to run a game. Why there would be
less now than last year, I have no idea.

The #1 problem that comes up after a game has started is database
corruption, and the whole game dying. :) It takes an agreesive
backup plan to keep a corrupted database from disrupting gameplay
too much.

 - Due to this perceived lack of reliable game servers, I am
 - considering trying to get my company to sponsor one. However, the
 - powers that be are corporate types, and correspondingly
 - conservative.  Are there any suggestions as to arguments I can
 - make in favor of running gb? I love games, but I have found that
 - many people do not share my enthusiasm - to say it mildly.

I doubt it.. Most admin types don't like game running on their
systems. Most games get ran at places where the admins like games, or
don't care either way. (They have CPU time to spare.)

 - What kind of hardware resources are required? Will the diety need
 - root access? 

The diety shouldn't need root access, as far as I know. As for
hardware requirements, you'd need at least a 56Kbps link to the
Interent at your site, 30-40meg of disk space, and a decent
speed machine. 

 - Could it be dietied across the net? (ie by someone not physically
 - at the hardware site.) etc.

That's how Feep was running his. :) No need to be physically
present at the computer to run the game.

 - Also, I have noticed some adds in Computer Game magazines for
 - commercial modem-connected game servers.  Would any of you pay to
 - play one?

Naa. When I can play GB for free, it'd take alot more than any
commercial games I've seen to make me pay. ;) Most of the space games
on GEnie, for example, pale next to GB in my opinion.

-----

I don't think I've mentioned this publicly on the net, so I might as
well do so here. I'm going to be running a public access Internet site
early next year. As a avid GB player, I"ll be fully supporting GB as
much as is possible on my system. A fellow GB'er out there in netland
is loaning us a Sun IPX, and a local company just offered to loan us a
3/260 at any configuration we like. Since the 3/260 is a longer-term
loan, as we may purchase it eventually, we'll run teh main system
there. The IPX will be used for news processing, IRC server, and teh
GB server. We'll eventually add other servers, but not at first.
So, in essence, we'll have a 40mhz SPARC as a nearly dedicated GB
server. We've mailed feep quite a bit about this, and hopefully
he'll be our resident god and coder. :) 

We'd like to see at least oen game running year round, if not
multiple games games at once. (How about games that last 3 months,
and we start one game a month? etc..). I could g on, but I don't
want to waste too much bandwidth. :) We've got alot of GB ideas, and
are pretty excited about the whole thing. (The other servers we may
run will be things like Go, and any game covered in
rec.games.abstract.)

Good luck!

-Valheru (One bores in, many bore out. ;)

-- 
  F F  Jonathan Roy, Vice President, Free Access Foundation.    GEnie: J.ROY18
   A   Mail faf@halcyon.com for information, or FTP to halcyon.com:  /pub/faf/
  F F  "A server is a terrible thing to waste."    Internet: ninja@halcyon.com
 "Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design." - _RotJ_