Hi! Since vietcong1.cz'd been down for few days one week and a bit ago, I've started creating my own servers/players list for Vietcong 1. It's online at http://vietcong1.tk/ and you can use it too if you want to.
Advantages of the website are:
- more realistic information – actual players aren't mixed up with past players, real players count is shown;
- suggestions – you can start typing in the name of a server, a map or a player and you will immediately get a list of suggestions;
- tables are automatically reloaded every minute, no need for pushing F5;
- only servers with game version 1.60 are shown by default;
- English is the default language.
Cool !
But can I suggest you to change the "dark green" colour of the jungle style with a "lighter green" one? Because it's hard to read the black text on it before the cursor passes on it...
Thanks for the feedback, Intruder! You're probably right. (I actually don't use this theme, too military for me. ) For this theme, I used a palette based on the VC menu. If I should change it and differ even/odd rows at the same time, I don't know what colour to choose, I must think it through. (Maybe I could change the basic text colour instead, but still I don't know what to, then.)
-When we pass the cursor on the "dark green", it becomes "light green"... But why not keeping that "light green" colour without to have that change of colour? I don't mind if we don't have that visual change anymore by passing the cursor on the tab...
-The other solution would be to have a yellow text (for example, to stay in the VC and Vietnam spirit) instead of the black one but it would start to be "too much of colours and effects" in my opinion...
Personally, I vote for the first solution...
But in that case, the other theme needs changes in the colours also then, I guess. Hmmm...
Ok, I've changed the bgOdd colour to the interpolation of the dark one and the light one, a compromise. The light one itself seemed to me making the whole page loosing the jungle theme. It probably depends on a monitor, I could read the black text even on the darker background. (I have a laptop.)
The Light theme is actually the first one I've created. I was exploring new CSS features, since I hadn't followed the progress for a few years, and I was like "WOW, I must use this! ... and that, and this..." The same stood for the palette when combining CSS named colours. I can imagine someone doesn't like it a lot (but I actually do ), so here comes the Jungle theme which was created by changing the palette (and is actually using only half the number of colours). But if you've got some suggestions also for the Light theme, please post them.
Sorry, the application was fetching the servers list from http://gstadmin.g...e=vietcong, but for some time the information provided by that site was empty. So I've changed the fetching mechanism to work with an application by Luigi Auriemma (http://aluigi.alt...htm#gslist) which works almost like the game's servers list fetching mechanism.
Anyway, I'm working on a different attitude where a fetched servers list will be used only for appending new servers, meaning old server records won't be automatically discarded. This attitude will, in effect, lead to an independence from the official GameSpy list. Also the application will offer a simple form to register a new server to fully gain this independence.
* Server registration form – if GameSpy server is down, this way people can register their servers to be monitored and displayed in the list (on the website).
* Own heartbeat service – if you change your hosts file to point master.gamespy.com to vietcong1.tk's IP, your server will also get noticed and monitored. Although this solution has one disadvantage yet – you'll get zero servers in the game's menu if you don't change your hosts file back after starting a server.
It works this way: master.gamespy.com listens on UDP port 27900 for heartbeat announcements (that's for servers – vcded.exe), and on TCP port 28900 for queries for the list of servers (that's for clients – vietcong.exe). While that UDP service is quite easy to implement, the TCP one is very obfuscated. Not because it's TCP, but because of content: first the server sends to a newly connected client some random word, which the client has to encrypt by some secret code and reply with that. Finally after that, the server sends the servers list. But in some gross format!!
Thanks to Luigi Auriemma we can decode this message, but it seems GameSpy made it this way to make their service unsubstitutable, the encoding algorithm is not publicly known. I tried communicating with vietcong.exe without the authentication with no luck, it seems this format is the only one it understands. But maybe Brchi knows something more about it, so could he have a word or two on this, please?
Good work
When sorting by players again (after sorting by something else), it should first be descending.
And the problem with registration is that the query port is not adjustable, it's not the game port preceded by 1 but just the next free port (15425+).
I have two servers running at the moment, and Homi with game port 5425 got query port 15426 because I started it after the other server.
I could always start my server first or your program could query from 15425 up until there's no response anymore, then assign the correct port to the registered server name by the returned server names.
What's the problem with the serverlist? We can already decode it, why do you want to encode it? Understanding how encoding works by looking at the decoding may be very hard..
Grid tables are built on a third-party product, and, actually, I think ordering works fine, at least this is the way I suppose it to behave – when switching ordering, first I want it to be ascending. (Well, "Online for" actually works the opposite way because it's ordered by the databse column "onlineSince", see.)
Thank you for the explanation of the query ports, I have to change that help text.
Well, the server registration is only of a teasure nature since GameSpy's list and its fetching works ok now, but when combined with own serverlist supplier, it would make an useable alternative to GameSpy, gaining some independence for VC if GameSpy were to abandon it. So this is the reason why I want to be able to encode the serverlist.
And no, I don't want my server to be listed as a suspicious scanner. So it's only a one-try registration and your server has to be accessible by that time.
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) For this theme, I used a palette based on the VC menu. If I should change it and differ even/odd rows at the same time, I don't know what colour to choose, I must think it through. (Maybe I could change the basic text colour instead, but still I don't know what to, then.)
The light one itself seemed to me making the whole page loosing the jungle theme. It probably depends on a monitor, I could read the black text even on the darker background. (I have a laptop.)
), so here comes the Jungle theme which was created by changing the palette (and is actually using only half the number of colours). But if you've got some suggestions also for the Light theme, please post them.
Not because it's TCP, but because of content: first the server sends to a newly connected client some random word, which the client has to encrypt by some secret code and reply with that. Finally after that, the server sends the servers list. But in some gross format!! 
x 1
x 1
