Valve Engine Update - Fix for RichNet

zodiac

<div class="IPBDescription">Switches no longer supported?</div>Today RichNet was downed for most of the day because we updated to the new Valve engine, not many knew of a fix and I did see that a good part of the NS server community out were down also.

Just reporting what worked for us as an FYI:

In our command line for many years now we have put special switches in an effort to draw down our game protocol overhead, well it looks as though Steam/Valve does not support these switches any longer with the new update. So the fix for us was to simplify our startup command line. Switches suspected of the issue were:

-tos
-noipx
+heartbeat

We also added the file steam_appid.txt to the root of our installation which simply includes the value of 70. This did not solve the issue by itself until we knocked the switches off.

Hope this might be useful to somebody out there, wished these answers came easier to us, took awhile to realize what the potential fix would be.

HLDS Linux
Amxmodx 1.8.1.3746
Metamod v1.19p32

Much Love and Respect for NS and Nsmod Communities.

Z

GiGaBiTe

I don't see why you're using those flags to begin with.

-ipx

This enables the older than dirt IPX protocol. IPX is a protocol used by DOS games and on networks in the absence of TCP/IP networking (back in the NetBEUI days.) It was a legacy from the original Quake engine and was never removed. The last version of windows to officially support it was NT 4 and Windows 98.

heartbeat

You don't need to do this because the server sends a master server request/response automatically. Unless you have some bizarre network setup that blocks certain types of traffic, this is useless.

-tos

I really have no idea what this does, but it isn't needed either.

Also, to save on all of the +/- startup flags, just put all of the commands in valve.rc. valve.rc is automatically executed when the hlds process is started (right after the gamedll is loaded) and is cleaner than having a startup thing spammed with commands.

Saint_Thoth

-tos tags UDP packets (outbound) "nodelay". Routers that listen for QoS tags can perform specific actions (like expedite traffic), so with this you can prioritize game network traffic. (No idea why Valve would disable the tag, save maybe the new protocol screws up the packets somehow.)

-ipx makes no sense unless you have odd net drivers. However, normally the HLDS loads the ipx protocol, and thus -noipx would make more sense for reducing console overhead. (This maybe what he actually meant, as I don't think there *is* an "-ipx" switch).

I’ve run across servers before that simply will not show up on the Steam browser without +heartbeat. Anything prefixed with a +, is executed at the same time your .cfg’s are though – so you can still slot it in the server.cfg.

Meh, there are far too many undocumented switches for the damn HLDS.

zodiac

Saint_Thoth got it and has a good understanding of what we were trying to do there and yes -noipx was the correct switch we had. We have always sought out some obscurities if it is going to make the game better, we have alot of this on this backend and under the hood. We've always geared ourselves that way.

Z

sherpa

It's head-bangingly frustrating to see an NS admin as technically competant as yourself having an NS server with xmenu and buildmenu.

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