Red Alert 3

I'm wondering if someone on gr would be able to make an alternative server including :

- Ladder : where the smurf would be not bugged, the fair play rules and sentence would be applied on gr and ra3, the dc's would be counted as an auto-lose for the one loosing his con or crashing, etc.

- Website : Just showing ladder, stats, historic games (name of players, map played, time when the game has been played, stats update in real time and not with a delay time, etc.)

- Ladder auto-reset : all the 1st of month in a specifique time etablished.

- Recording stats : allowing us to check some past stats and maybe hosting.

I'm just giving some basic idea of how the server should be made and I'm sure if we can get something like this we will bring back a lot of old players and make the competition scene harder and more revelant than it has ever been.

Should not be that hard to make it possible after all, if the old cnc games did it we should be able to do it too ^^


If someone has the required competence to make it possible could he show up and talk us about how it would be possible to make it happen ?

tbh i dont think there will be a perfect server like u said. unless we have our own server. but i am wondering if anyone can add the ladder function to garena or something like that. if we can have ladder, i also think this game will be far more active and competitive than it is now ^^

Get the creator of shatabrick here, ask him to add all that stuff u want in and maybe just maybe a new server could be started. I want this as much as you JapnabragerselloffquitwhenhegetsAMwithrono.

kiswa is gone and gave toxicshocks the administration of shatabrick.


However, adding a system like xwis would be fantastic.
The question is how difficult would it be?

clanwars.cc works for all of that, it just requires you to report your loss.

There is no server to play on however..

Garena etc, is just like playing in a lan enviroment, you are the host, and you are the server. So they cant use the original ranking system at all... We might aswell make a Hamachi server for all on GR...

I agree with zokker. Something like xwis would be fantastic, they did it on ra 2, they reversed the game engine and remade a lot, and that is why they can have such awesome rank system...

However RA3 is a much bigger engine to reverse, which means it will take more time, and likely be more difficult. With this being said, i doubt anyone will take on this task, since there is litterally no way to get the original project/source codes from EA, you would have to reverse the entire client/server system in order to customize it.

E: About shatabrick, i am pretty sure its totally dependent on gamespys IRC system in order to import its data. Stuff like shatabrick and that annoying IRC bot with trivia is not gonna work once gamespy shutsdown their peerchat.

This post has been edited by FISSENDK: Apr 7 2014, 15:24 PM

Well there doesn't need to be thaaat much reverse engineering. You basically need to log the out- and inbound traffic the game creates to test what it sends and expects as answer. Then you basically just have to patch the look up address where the game looks for the server (which is iirc actually not even hardcoded).

Customizing your client, server and rank system to work with the original system is not that simple, as well as its probably illegal since EA has legal rights for the software... Packet sniffing/logging the entire client to server db system would still take a lot of time and effort to do.

It can be done, but it does takes a lot of time and effort...

E: So lets just pray they turn ra3 into abandonware soon...

This post has been edited by FISSENDK: Apr 7 2014, 21:59 PM

EA is or at least was supporting XWIS, if their stance hasn't changed they rather appreciate it. The live team, which sadly never did anything meaningful but KW 1.2 was actually created for these cases, they even promised to give out real source code to specific people in the community. Too bad EA didn't want to spend the money to keep that alive.

From what I remember xwis wasnt official ra2 server at start. And this has been for a loooong while (until end of 2005) when EA finaly decided to let xwis as the official server and shutted down WOL.

But before this, the official server was still WOL (Westwood Online) and players had to use a patch to move on xwis intialy.

After long hard work from Olaf yes... the xwis server was not officially supported until long after WOL was a wasteland filled with spam bots.

Don't expect too much from EA I'd say.

edit:
I somehow didn't read Kiro his post.

Well the point was that there is a precedent for EA supporting something like this.

Since this news broke I've had a few.
I liked evolve and gameranger.
but are only Network.
another possibility that is currently used in Ra3
emulator "online" called TeknoGods
Like entering the room now everything is similar. It's just another server.

http://teknogods.com/phpbb/

Why not have one of the players take care of the servers (if it is possible, I am just throwing an idea out there)? I mean, you would need the servers, UPS, a cool room (servers get hot real fast), possibly a fan or 2 during hot weather, racks to hold the servers, and the most important thing, the rights to RA3 to host it and make changes so the ladder can be fixed and also if possible other bugs that affect the game.

I know all of this stuff is expensive and it wouldn't exactly be fair to the person who has to keep the servers in their house and pay the electric bill to keep them on. But its just an idea.

This post has been edited by Deception: Apr 25 2014, 05:47 AM

Hey guys. Providing any old "server" is not the problem here. The problem is in understanding what the server is supposed to do. It is a pretty complicated system (although it is similar to that used by the other games hosted by GameSpy). Almost all of the traffic is encrypted and comes from different places (there are in fact 4 or 5 server functions involved in running the on-line hosting). For example, the server that provides the lobby and most of the functionality is not the same server that provides the list of hosted and playing games in the lobby. The buddy and friend system is a separate system again. The service that provides and records the statistics is another system as is the service that provides the rank icons. The service that runs the authentication is entirely separate.

A few of us (including Kiswa) had a good look at reverse engineering some of that this time last year and did not get far enough with it to help at this stage.

Things (in terms of computing power and connectivity) have come a long way since 2003 when the GameSpy system was first used to host Command and Conquer games. These days, the Network Game mode is a viable alternative for playing our games. I would like to have a look at Win/Loss reporting from network games and see if we can implement our own statistics and ladder system that way. Clearly, the win/loss information is sent to the other players in the game, so it should be possible to capture that information and report to a central server. If anyone thinks that they can help with that (somebody that is able to analyse the network traffic), please shoot me a PM. I've started on it.