As I've often said, my friend' server (Ducks Coop Range) and my "VC_/FA_ maps" are usually VERY stable. I know it because we play "them" a lot "there"! lol
However, because more and more players are joining (I would say "non-regulars" ones), we have more and more troubles on the server aswel!
After a lot of "thinking", I'm guessing that when it happens, it's because the "non-regulars" players (I mean for our server only) are joining with "extra stuff" in their game, like new .dll or .cbf files (?)...
Usually the map is played normally, but at the "nextmap", some players are kicked for cheating (usually #30) and those who have lost the server at the change can't rejoin anymore because the server is showing "full" suddenly (even if only 3 players are on the map for example)... Only a server restart will "clear" the situation...
I think to have also noticed that the "non-regulars" players are rather close the "editing's world" and I won't be surprised to know they have "edited stuff" in their VC folder. I've already asked to some of those players and they said it may be possible...
For me, the real problem is that NON cheaters players are now, apparently able to join a server (client side) to corrupt its data (server side), with "still unknown" stuff...
I've often read "here and there" that Vietcong wasn't a very stable game and that the servers are now crashing very regularily... But following my own experiments, I can tell you that my first Vietcong install lasted...more than 6 years (without to have been obliged to reinstall the game, but only XP!), and that the combination of my friend' server and the "VC_/FA_ maps" are usually very stable (95%?) like I said before...
Note that as many of the Coop servers, we don't play with Hradba.
I don't know what will be "the sequel" of this thread but I wanted to share my observations with you because Vietcong seems to suffer, more and more, of different kinds of "troubles" (respawning/rejoining bugs, crashes, voicechat not working, no more grenades...) and I'm almost sure "we" (the mappers/editors and so the players) are a big part of the problems without to notice it...
I spoke with Brchi about server stability. He debugged vcded during crash and found some problems. A lot of problems are because wrong memory allocation. He created VCGuard system specialy for our server, so now we have about 1-2 crashes per day only. Ofcourse everything depends also on server conditions, it means server is stable after PC restart but after one week number of crashes rapidly increase. So starting yesterday I setup server PC to restart automaticaly every morning at 6:00. In combination of "clear memory" and Brchi's VCGuard server should be quite stable. At least some problems are solved now.
Another thing is bugged maps - we still have some maps which crashing server. Everytime when I found this map I removed it from server. But I don't know about all crashes, nobody reporting it on forum
Our server can work now without any touching, everything is automated.
So my suggestion:
1. use only stable maps, not bugged. If you know about map which crashing server don't use it
2. don't use more maps than 60 in your maplist and mapfolder. Every map has 2 files, one of them is loaded to memory when VC starts and consumpting memory. If you have hundreds maps use folders like maps, maps2, maps3... with ded files 1.ded, 2.ded,... and when you start server, just rename folder which you want to maps folder and run it with related ded file. At our server we have 3 folders with maps now and I want to create fourth folder. Each morning before VCDED starts the set of map is changed. I created simple batch file which is handling it.
3. make server PC restarts, don't run PC for several days without restart because of memory leaks. Also I can recommend no additional firewalls, antiviruses and another programms on this PC. All of them can cause problems with packet delay or lost and sometimes server can crash. Few years ago I have problems with one firewall, server crashing after every map change. When I disabled FW the problem was solved.
4. Ask Brchi for the same tool (VC Guard) which he provided to us. It fixes a lot of bugs in VC (not all) so server is more stable. As I said - we had about 20 crashes everyday before, now we have only 1-2.
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