leeroyka

Yet some more questions. :P When you have made some custom missions, and added to your server.cfg, the server automatically starts the first map on the list once a player joins, is it possible to add more cvars like "timelimit"? Or is that done in the actual map file?

Thanks for fast replay m8, also another question. When the map classes are completely left out of the server.cfg, the server starts loading a mission when people are on and just gets stuck at loading with this message "No entry 'bin\config.bin/CfgWorlds.GenericNames'." Any idea what that might be? *SOLVED* Some of the files were not patched up to 1.02 somehow, repatched and server started working properly.

Guys can you please provide some extra explanations. So say I want to make a coop mode map, how is it done? Or if say I used the editor in the game, how do I parse that map into here? How this works?

Yeah good point. There are difficulties in doing that mostly because apart from the normal players, you get additional dynamic objects as bots. Not sure about ballistics of game, since I think Arma2 does not have actual registering of projectiles in real time, they likely hit with a delay depending on distance or otherwise that would be uber difficult to implement in reality. The size and scale are a problem but the higher size means it expands the scope of the x, y, z coordinates passed with each entity which is again a string/hex/few bytes of data representing numbers. 100,000 points in space (arranged as a cube) can be plotted with x(0-99), y(0-99), z(0-99). It's probably more complicated than that in ArmA2, but still I think its possible to do with large scale maps as in Arma2.

Yes Bohemia please port LINUX! It is uber vital for all!

This post is for a dedicated guy who is willing to understand how basic netcode functions, without all the made up stuff. Well the whole map doesn't actually get "streamed", otherwise you would have to stream over 1 gig sometimes... Netcode works in different ways. Simple explanation... in most of the games, (their servers) just send compressed "states" of the whole "dynamic" environment to each player.. You don't have to send the map, it's static on your pc, but everything that can move, change, must be transmitted. What that means, if you have say 10 players respectively, then their positions, in coordinates (x, y, z), their states (health, ammo, name, etc) are transmitted, along with other code, for example when they are in a vehicle. This applies to objects too. So in fact its very minute packets of data, being sent to every player. Then your computer (client) does the rest, it updates the positions of players, vehicles, objects. As you can imagine, no "graphics" or huge textures are being sent, its mostly vector data with other string information, i.e code, and that is all small. At the same time, the server constantly receives updates from each player and simulates the "world state" to be transmitted to each player again. Preferably, that happens many times each SECOND, so in say 1 second you may get 10-40 (or more) updates, and send as many, depending on ping, quality of connection, errors, etc. As you can see the principle is not difficult, for the Server...to get all information (coordinates, keyboard inputs, mouse inputs, mic inputs) from clients (receive from players), process information, then create a simulated update "world state" of all, to be sent to all players. But you start running into problems, because this all happens asynchronously and at fast rates, there are delays at each step clients--->server---->clients, so it doesn't happen fluid real time, like a single player game, where the delays are in nanoseconds, not milliseconds. Most of the advanced netcode techniques have been pretty much grasped and used in most successful multiplayer/massive multiplayer games. Not so in ArmA2, yet hopefully. The impact of map size or size of environment has less importance on smoothness of gameplay within netcode (not fps or graphics slowdowns) (not load times), as opposed to amount of players and moving objects, on a server. So higher number of players, need more bandwidth and amount of data transmitted. Good examples and explanations of netcode practices found at http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_Networking