Okay, for anyone not even remotely interested in a VALVe vs Epic holywar, ye should delete this email and not bother reading it. It's just me rambling about sucky Epic stuff. Even though they have some good points, admining servers generally shows all their bad ones all at once. :p
<rant> Yeah, you have to learn a completely new scripting language which executes slower then C++ code and a majorly "prettified" engine which doesn't actually run on anything but the highest of high end video cards currently available.
You ever tried being a server administrator for ~10 UT2004 servers? It's friggen hopeless. The logging system is pathetic and practically useless for all intents and purposes, the anti-cheat protection is almost as useless as VAC, whenever you login as an admin the server graciously TELLS EVERYONE so any suspected cheaters bugger off for a few hours then come back again. They run competitions with stupid timeframes that cause a -lot- of patches for each mod to be released (we were looking at ~4 in a week for Deathball - you try keeping that and another 100 servers up-to-date).
There's NO built-in way for users to find out another users uniqueid without physically going to their computer and checking in ini files or the setup menu, so "incident reporting" systems are completely useless because you can't get the ID of someone confirmed, even though the ID's are completely unique and not backwards-engineerable.
In fact, to get even close to VALVes (vanilla hlds) standard of server-administration you actually need to install around 4 third-party addons. I mean, it's stupid. The mapcycle, engine configuration, banlist, game cvars, etc are all stored in the ONE FILE. What about the people that dynamically generate banned.cfgs for their server? They have to dynamically regenerate the whole damn configuration file for each server that has a different gametype.
Epic standards are hopeless when it comes to server administration of more then one server, even their built-in webadmin is flawed so we leave it disabled for security reasons.
They have NOTHING on a -seven year old- game. It's almost as bad as battlefield, where you have to write an essay to ban someone.
Oh no! I want to change the variable that forces people to respawn once they die rather then waiting till they click fire, what's the line I have to enter?! adminlogin myadminpassword admin get XGame.XDeathmatch bForceRespawn admin set XGame.XDeathmatch bForceRespawn False adminlogout
Anyone remember the good ol' "rcon_password blah" "rcon sv_forcerespawn" "rcon sv_forcerespawn 0" (note: that command doesn't exist).
Mayyyybe you want to change maps, but don't remember which maps are on the server, how do you find out? Stuffed if I know, there's absolutely NO DOCUMENTATION WHATSOEVER. Just a note, "admin servertravel dm-something" when "something" doesn't exist will reload the current map and completely screw the game. Ie: You shoot someone, they go from 100hp down to negative health then become "stuck" and can't do anything until the server changes map or restarts. </endrant>
- Bruce "Bahamut" Andrews
John Bellone wrote:
Jeffrey "botman" Broome wrote:
Bruce "Bahamut" Andrews wrote:
bah, Epic have NOTHING on VALVe...
...except $1,000,000.00 contests for MOD authors. :)
http://www.unrealtournament.com/ut2003/contest.php
-- Jeffrey "botman" Broome
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And Unrealscript, Unreal Engine 3, and among other things.
-- John Bellone Project Manager, Programmer Flipside Software http://www.flipsidesoftware.com
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