Dear S3, We need to talk about your implementation of the dedicated server. I can hardly believe that a seasoned game like R3E has such a limited featureset for its dedicated server. Time and time again there have been suggestions and requests for changes and/or improvements, but a total of 2 or maybe 3 additions in 6 months? You can do better. Especially when you consider what the additions actually were... Reputation limits, import/export of settings, they're hardly pressing issues. With the list below I hope to give you some much needed inspiration to further improve the dedicated server, and in effect the experience for server admins. Live banlist changes Currently if you ban someone, they get added to the banlist, but that change only becomes active when the server is restarted. If the server is in practice or quali sessions, the banned player can re-enter the server without a problem. This has to change. If a player with malicious intent has a long breath, you constantly have to keep banning that player until finally the race begins, and even after that race they can come back if you don't restart the server. This goes for adding items to and removing items from the banlist. Banning flexibility - automatic timers As someone with thousands of unique players every month, I can't be expected to keep track of who I ban and how long they're supposed to stay banned. Say I want to ban someone for a few days to be lenient, I can't do that automatically. Incidents insights Apart from automatic timers, it would be great to see how many incidents a player has caused in a session or amount of time. Bans after x incidents per minute could affect races a lot in situations like spa/etc. Just showing how much mayhem someone has caused in a certain amount of time gives the admin the power to do something about it. Centralized community banlist(s) One could say certain players show the same bad behavior across the entire game. S3 has already voiced their opinion on this, being "the responsibility lies with server admins". We'd like to have a community maintained banlist that can be directly integrated into our dedicated servers by either URL input or a checkbox for pre-made community-approved banlists. Ability to import and export banlist I guess this one speaks for itself, it'd work just like the import/export feature for server settings. Networking improvements A single dedicated server instance has a maximum of 5 servers it can host. Why are the assigned TCP and UDP ports for these servers dynamic? The randomness of these port changes are a tedious thing to keep track of. Assign static ports to the servers that always remain the same. It'll be up to the server admin to keep these ports free on the host machine. You could say ports 60000 - 60015 are already reserved for R3E in a way. Maximum incidents per minute/hour/etc I was very happy to finally have an option to set a maximum amount of incidents per session. However, this is not always enough. A player could wreck 3 others in a session if its incidents limit is set to 20, without him getting kicked. If you could set a maximum of x incidents per minute, this could be prevented. Specific server exports (templates) Say you run a few 24/7 server instances, but you also run league events. You have to rotate some servers and change their settings every time the format changes. A complete import/export of all settings does not suffice because your 24/7 servers need to keep running. The ability to import and export a single set of server settings would be great. -- additions below -- Keep tracking incidents in practice sessions Just like in quali and race sessions. To prevent players from causing trouble during long practice sessions or on trackday servers. Customization of consequences due to amount of incidents Create a subsystem for server admins to decide what to do with a player when the incidents limit gets breached. Like in Assetto Corsa Competizione - the player gets locked into the pit box for 30 seconds. Pit stops flexibility - amount per session/race Add the option to set an amount of mandatory pit stops per race, and if it's a multi-race session, make the amount of mandatory pit stops changeable per race. Enable players to finish their final qualifying lap after the timer reaches zero Right now the qualifying session ends right after the timer reaches zero, even if players are still on a flying lap. This should be a configurable setting. In some other games it's possible to still finish your lap if you cross the finish line before the timer reaches zero. A way to get the current list of drivers and their place The list of drivers the server currently gives is enough to know who's driving what, and where they are (X,Y-coordinates), but not in what place you are, making live leaderboards impossible. A way to get the current track/layout on the server. You can set a server up with 2 or 3 tracks, and you can see the current session in the web interface, but you need to join the game to see which track is currently active. This means that whilst I can get the players, their location, and their car, I cannot plot them on a map. An example from GT Legends: A way for admins to kick/ban players with a message Basically the way it is now, if I kick you it says "You have been booted". You don't know whether it was because your ping is so high that nobody knows where you are, you were being a *%@!, or for some other reason. In RRC, this can also be due to a too low reputation (as you are automatically kicked then), which is annoying, because people are often not aware of it. There are obviously more ideas that the community has brought forward. These are just a few I've gathered. Feel free to reply with your ideas, and I'll add them to this post. List contributors: UsF, Milo, Venderwel, Davide, Koenvh, [tbd]. Thank you for reading ! Milo
I agree with everything Milo has said, I have tried to put my thoughts down before but never sounded as I wanted, as someone who hosts severs I/we need more options like the ones above so we can improve the experience for user base we hope to build Colin
I agree with all Milo says here! I also miss something else: I'd like to host sprint races and features races. I want to be able to set pitstops per race! And while you're at it, make it so you can set the amount of pitstops too.
Thanks for your suggestion! While a session can already have multiple races with differing durations, it would indeed be nice to have some more flexibility with how mandatory pitstops are set up. I've added your suggestion to the OP.
Hi guys - can someone please advise if they have experienced something smilair than what I put in this post? https://forum.sector3studios.com/index.php?threads/dedicated-server-front-end-not-loading.15244/ Basically when starting the dedicated server - it doesn't load the frontend - I just get a blank screen in my browser...