FAQ
Will DedCon run on my computer?
If your computer is a x86 running Windows or Linux or a Mac running OSX Tiger or anything that can emulate one of those, then yes.
How do you know? I haven't even told you my system specs!
DedCon is a very simple program that neither has to do a lot of calculation or take up a lot of memory or network bandwidth. You can expect it to use
- about 3 - 5 MHz worth of CPU power per connected client (spectators and players count)
- about 700 bytes of network bandwith per connected client, more for those who come in late, but you're free to put a cap on the bandwidth use
- about 10 Mbytes of main memory per hour the game is running, which can be virtual memory without significant performance penalty.
The test servers run on a 266 MHz Pentium MMX with 128 Mbyte memory in debug mode with full network logging enabled inside a debugger and only occasionally manage to use up more than 20% of that CPU together (those occasions being new spectators joining).
I'm completely lost, how do I run a server?
Check the documentation section here, perhaps there is something that helps you.
Would it be possible to <something with player scores> automatically?
No, unfortunately not. Defcon's network model is a "fat client" model where the server only serves as a relay between the clients, collecting player input from them and distributing it to the other clients. The server has almost zero knowledge of the game state (see here for what it can possibly know) and certainly does not know about player scores. Getting the scores from the clients would be technically possible, but is not currently part of the protocol. Getting the scores from the players manually is possible and has been implemented; if the players enter their own scores with /setscore and sign them with /signscore, they are logged for suitable tools to process.
I've got a great idea what you could implement, what should I do?
Read this; the link to actually submit the request is at the bottom.
I've found a bug, what do I do?
I've found a .dcrec file on the net, what are those and what do I do with them?
They are game recordings. To play them back, you first need to install DedCon. Windows users then just have to doubleclick on the .dcrec file to play it back. Linux and OSX users have to invoke the dedcon program with the "-l" command line switch, followed by the filename of the recording. This starts a server that advertises itself with zero available player slots; join it with your DEFCON client to watch the playback.
Game recordings? How do I produce them myself?
Well, the fist step is that you need to use DedCon to host the games you want to record. The second step is that you put
Record name_of_recording_file.dcrec
in your configuration file. When the server exits regularly (do not abort it!), it will write the game recording to that file.
How big do game recordings get?
That depends on the number of players, the real time the game is taking, and the activity level of the players. Expect about one kilobyte (that means, plan for two) per average player per minute. To a lesser extent, chatty spectators can also increase the size. Recordings compress rather well, if you archive them, you can expect the size to go down by a factor of 5. A full six player game with default world scale and game speed usually stays below 100 kb compressed, a duel below 40 kb. Several of them fit on those rectangular things people used to store data on, whatwastheirname, ah, floppies.
