[Andrew]

Hey,

Just a head's up that theres been a few changes deployed for GameCreate today.

Usually theres a few changes you never see until you encounter them, but here's a summary of what's changed recently.

Master Improvements
We've updated our master servers to better handle disconnects. You may encounter a few disconnects every now and then as usual, however the problem that they never reconnect should be eliminated. The masters will be more reliable.

We plan to eliminate the disconnect problem in the future, however it will take some time to fully implement

Linux Screen Support
SCREEN Support for Linux has been added!

GameCreate Client for Linux can now optionally run your servers of a particular game under a screen session.

Screen session's should be used for games such as Counter-Strike and Battlefield 2, where the server may spawn additional processes, or require a virtual terminal in order to run. You should turn on Screen mode in this case.

Some times you may not want to run a screen session (for example, a Ventrilo server) where it works fine on its own and you do not want the additional overhead of Screen running.

GameCreate Client is yet to be automatically updated for you, however you can trial the beta version below:

* Linux: http://www.gamecreate.com/files/beta/gamecreate.x86
* Windows: http://www.gamecreate.com/files/beta/gamecreate.exe

There are other minor changes to the client (for both Windows and Linux) which wont be noticeable to you.

To make use of automatic screen support in Linux; visit the Game Configuration tab and enable the Screen option there.
Restart your server for the change to take effect.

Game File Favorites
Some games come with a lot of files (for example, Enemy Territory) and you may want to work with a few often without sifting through the list.

If you have two or more overridden (or new) Game File's created, a small Star icon will appear beside each of these files under the Game File listing. Clicking the Star will mark it as a Favorite, and place it to the top of the list for better visibility.

Statistics
Individual Game, Host, Server and Domain Statistic's have received an update. You can now view extended information (going back since the start of your server) for per day, week and monthly stats - instead of the handful shown to you.

You can also now view the last 24 Hours in table form by choosing the 'Hourly' Period from the drop down box.

Ajax Updates
Several commonly used interface element's of GameCreate have received Ajax updates. For example, deleting a Game File will now cause the page to be updated by Ajax instead of reloading the entire page. This allows you to get more things done quicker.

Minor Fixes
There have been a few other minor fixes and changes, such as providing default values for the CHECKBOX Property type and other misc updates.

As always, we are interested in your feedback!

Cheers,
Andrew

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[Kybber]

Thank you, Andrew!

I've been on vacation and have been playing catch-up
over the last week, so I've only now gotten around
to installing the new client.

Hosts unable to reconnect seem to be a thing of the
past - great job!

I've successfully run CSS in a screened session. The
server starts and stops as expected. I'll soon try to
remove/modify my wrapper script which I use for
running BF2/BF2142 in screened sessions, and use
GC's built-in support instead. I would, however, like
to see screen as a configuration option so that I can
turn it on and off for individual servers. This can be
very helfpul when tracking down bugs and unexpected
behaviour on specific servers.

Game File favourites is a great idea! Can it also be
extended so that we get favourite files listed first
for serverconfigs as well? It's always a pain to search
for the maplist, for instance.

[Andrew]

Hey,

I've updated Game File Favorites so that you can favorite global/system files (ones that are predefined) for complete-ness.

I'm thinking a per-server file favorite may be a bit messy.

Did you mean if the game file favorites were inherited at the server level? So that file favorites for a server config for example appear on the server level?

This is a bit tricky when it comes to per servers as you can override a server config file, should that still be favorite'd? Perhaps per server ones should be used as well, Im not sure. Dont want to get too complex

[Kybber]

Agreed: Per-server-favourites would be messy, but
that's not quite what I meant: What I meant is when
I favourite for instance the CSS-game's mapcycle
at cstrike/mapcycle%server:port%.cfg, that file should
end up on top not only in the game file overview, but
also in each and every server's file-view. That way I
can easily find it whenever I need to change the
mapcycle of a server, which is a relatively common
operation.

An extension of this may be to allow two levels of
favourites on the game file tab: One on game
level, and one on server level. Files that are often
modified for individual servers (like maplist) can
then be tagged to be on top for all servers, while
files that are often modified on game-level, such as
primary server configs, can be tagged to be on top
in the game file list.

This would be very helpful for some games that
have a bunch of config-files