Minimal server project

[mkzelda]

*WARNING* This post is a WIP (Work-In-Progress) and will receive many edits.

I'm a very neat and organized person. I dont like clutter and cruft. Strange doesn't even describe my computer usage habits. I also have a lot of old hardware I like to put to good use. For the sake of getting the best possible gameplay and satisfying my curiosity as to how barebones a server I could build, I have made a minimal server ready for rapid deployment. This project has two phases, and most of you will be interested in the second.

[Phase 1]
Using a gentoo minimal x86 installcd I installed gentoo as generically as possible to be as compatible as possible on x86 hardware. I compiled everything with full i686 generic optimisations. Any further processor specific optimizations have been omitted. This build should work on any 32bit 686 or 64-bit running as 32. I installed only a basic install with no X or anything other than a working system with working toolbox to compile anything else. If anyone is interested in more on this, I'll be glad to elaborate and/or provide the binaries for this. If I ever get to it, I'll make a livecd out of this w/ the nexuiz installation, so you can run this on a computer w/o requiring a harddrive. I could launch nexuiz from a ramdrive. There is some fun potential for this project.

[Phase 2]
[i]* Performance evaluation: Uncompressed (no overhead, more disk usage) vs Best compressed (Dec overhead, less disk thrashing)
* Re-run the process to get exact results for here
[/i]
The stock data pack (data-20070531.pk3) is 261mb. Uncompressed it is 612mb. To uncompress, simply unzip the data-20070531.pk3 with your favorite zip/rar/ace/7zip/tar/gz/etc tool.
One of my servers is a 1v1 ladder rules. I have no interest in changing it to any other gamemode, so I don't need any of those maps or models. I stripped out all the maps but the 13 ladder rules maps (aggressor, aneurysm, bloodprison, darkzone, downer, final_rage, reslimed, runningman, runningman_1v1remix, soylent, stormkeep, toxic, warfare). Although just small text files, I also took out the 13 map configurations for other gamemodes (dom, tdm, etc). Since we use fullbright models, I could take out the other models. The 5 included demo files got scrapped. duAfter all was said and done these were my results:
data20071122-common.pk3 4.7MB
data20071122-1v1.pk3 26MB

From 261MB to 31MB :)
I also did the same for 2v2: data20071128-2v2.pk3 27MB

$ unzip data-20070531.pk3
$ 7za a -tzip -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m data20071225.pk3 *

Thus far this was a proof-of-concept for me. Since all the maps are being reworked, this project is on hold until 2.4 comes out. I'm watching the progress of the data pack now and I should be able to adapt quickly.

[-z-]

Nice man, really good idea. Do you plan on doing anything to the server.cfg?

You used 1v1 as an example but will there be gamemode specific builds?

Is it possible to make a fullbright ctf server that overrides red/blue with say orange/green?

[mkzelda]

Actually, yes I already forced the 1v1 configs in the 1v1, 2v2 in 2v2, and 3v3 in 3v3 and they get launched from the quake.rc
Other nice things like mapname aliases (to ease voting), helpful motd's, etc are included.

I've been thinking about the fb teams and I still have to look into that.