Server Administration Suggestions

[panoptical2]

Hi everyone. Here are a couple suggestions I think could be implemented regarding server administration.

1. There needs to be some sort of rcon that allows you to control the game from the Server Launcher or another application.

I recently took it upon myself to start 6 Altitude servers for new players and intermediate players. However, I've noticed that it's actually particularly hard to admin the servers, because I have to be logged in and playing or spectating to be able to admin them. This becomes harder when my player level is too high or too low to be able to join the server.

2. The server application needs to be opened up to allow for plugins and mods.

Yes, most mods suck on servers, but they generally encourage more users to create servers. Also, there can be random gems that pop up, such as SourceMod for Source servers.

3. The server configuration needs to be able to be updated without restarting the server.

For example, I'd like to be able to change the total player count on the next map change. Well, I can't do that without restarting the server. Better yet, I can't do that on my one server without restarting ALL my servers. Which brings me to my next point...

4. The server launcher application needs to be able to restart and control individual servers.

I would like to restart one server because I want to change it. With most other games, this would mean Control-C'ing 1 working shell, and relaunching the shell script. Here, that means closing the Server Launcher, and reopening it with the updated configuration. This forces all 6 servers to restart.

Yes, I know there's a workaround to this, and that I can use 6 different server configurations and 6 different server launchers. However, this is lame and requires a lot of unnecessary work from server admins. Also, it uses more ram.

These are just a few suggestions; I'm sure other fellow admins can come up with more.

[epicface]

I may have a solution for the first one, althought it might not be as good as you wanted it to be. Take a look at my thread: http://altitudegame.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3533