Project Reality Forums

Perhaps at this very-mature stage of Project Reality's life (EST. 2006) the team can reconsider the helicopter-parent-esque policy on dedicated server file distribution?

The stance of "quality over quantity" seems a tad extreme at this point, when PRSPY currently shows a total of 4 online servers (only 1 actually populated).

In this situation it would be comforting to be able to run a dedicated LAN server, so one can host a decent sized COOP match without taxing their own CPU performance.

However the server licensing model practically bans the hosting of such LAN servers. This approach despite LANs being the last refuge of old games and mods, after their online communities dwindle, starting in the outer regions (Oceania!).

The server restrictions also effectively stifle the potential of any unofficial mini-mods by requiring passwords - assuming they pass the application process in the first place.
If EA took that same approach to Battlefield 2 there would be no Project Reality, once a mini mod by name.

I figure by PR's 13th year someone might start reflecting on these things.

Worst-case-scenario theories welcome, e.g. "ALL THE SERVERS WILL BE BATTLE ROYALE AND EVERYONE WILL HAVE SANTA HATS!"

While you definitely list all the positive aspects of no server licensing , you don't for one second seem to think why it's there in the first place.

Anyhow, for now this is definitely not changing. Server license is still doing exactly what we want it to do. But you aren't wrong in thinking that perhaps some its restrictions could be simplified or some of its rules removed. But that's something we will discuss internally in due time.

Snazz wrote:The stance of "quality over quantity" seems a tad extreme at this point, when PRSPY currently shows a total of 4 online servers (only 1 actually populated).

By default, PRSPY only shows servers with at least 1 player in them, there are many more totally empty servers up. Click the "Show Empty Servers" button at the bottom to view all the servers currently running. Currently, there are 42 servers running the latest PR build.

Snazz wrote:In this situation it would be comforting to be able to run a dedicated LAN server, so one can host a decent sized COOP match without taxing their own CPU performance.

However the server licensing model practically bans the hosting of such LAN servers. This approach despite LANs being the last refuge of old games and mods, after their online communities dwindle, starting in the outer regions (Oceania!).

Humm, I've never tried hosting a COOP LAN server so I don't know how much CPU that taxes, but wouldn't have thought it would be that much?

Snazz wrote:The server restrictions also effectively stifle the potential of any unofficial mini-mods by requiring passwords - assuming they pass the application process in the first place.
If EA took that same approach to Battlefield 2 there would be no Project Reality, once a mini mod by name.

There have been mini-mods for PR in the past, the most successful of them was Combined Arms and because it was a mini-mod, it was able to run its own servers the way it wanted totally fine, outside of our server licence agreement as it ran separately from PR, just piggybacking off of PR's data.

I think you're confusing "server-side mods" for "mini-mods" which are two totally different things, but can see why some might call a serverside mod a minimod out of confusion and in some games (like ARMA) you can host minimods totally on the server in the normal game and have players download the new files or w/e when they join but this isn't possible with BF2, so you don't have to worry about everyone getting Santa hats through a serverside mod as that isn't possible with the BF2 engine, at least not without the Santa hat already being in PR to begin with

TBH if you could do bigger changes like that with serverside mods, we would probably be more lenient towards them but that simply isn't the case.

What instead we have seen in the past when servers where allowed to do what they liked in the way of serverside modding, was they made the spawn times on assets very small (5secs for a tank), made it so you could have an infante amount of tanks on a map and just totally ruined the gameplay and balance of the mod, which was incredibly bad at the time for new players getting their first impression on servers that was more spammy and faster paced than vBF2 and with more powerful weapons to top it off.

While this is less likely to happen these days, the server agreements ensure this stuff does not happen and players can get the expected core PR gameplay on every server running, unless it is passworded and then they know what they can find out what is different on that server when finding the password for it.

I hope that clears some things up for you.