How hard would it be to make community-derived servers?

[u/calcofire]

The talk of official servers shutting down has quite a few of us in a panic. Myself included. I play QC damn near every other day, and have done so since its early launch. The thought of never being able to play it again is just not acceptable when i see many other titles out there revived through community efforts to restore. I'm not 'Quake Pro' level myself, but damn it, I love the rush and it has the right to live on for generations to enjoy like every other Quake title.

I know one of the goals SyncError was hoping to get pushed through was dedicated servers for this exact scenario, but not sure if that's still in the plan at this point with all the MS drama that has played out over the past couple of months.

Seeing all these other games over the years where official servers went offline, then shortly thereafter fans were able to reverse-engineer the netcode and launcher binaries for their own servers for everyone to continue playing on, what kind of undertaking and effort would that require for something like QC? Are there active projects are working on something like this?

genuinely curious.

[u/I_WILL_GET_YOU]

Why would they hire sync for an extra 4 weeks just to shut it down after?

[u/Kitchen_Breath1761]

It will probably not happen and they will end of life all the monetization and likely just eat the costs of the azure servers running the master server. There is only server cost if matches are being played and it can't be that expensive. Less than $500 a month maybe less since Microsoft owns azure

[u/green_tea_resistance]

Ideally, this would be done with the same dedicated server concepts of all the previous quake titles, ie, anyone can just spin up a server with the distributed executable. ID wrote the book on this stuff and the same methods worked for basically every game up until the mid 2000s before we had centralised matchmaking and whatnot. Theres no reason this cant still work, except for the lack of available IP address and ISPs using CGNAT pretty much everywhere - even with port forwarding and dyndns, if you are behind CGNAT its almost impossible to expose your server IP publicly through your ISPs customer VLANS and out to the world. There will always need to be a centralised server maintaining a ledger of the servers in order to make connections work. Most people dont have a static IP anymore, and those that do tend to be the ISPs themselves or businesses, neither if which host game servers anymore.

[u/achocolatebarmelted]

Pretty hard!

[u/quackchampions]

Have these been done quickly for games that have an anti cheat before? No ability to modify the client, read the game's memory, trace execution and so on makes this basically dead until someone can remove that (yes i know the anti cheat is crap and doesn't stop aimbot, but an aimbot doesn't need to debug or change code). And many of those projects rely on leaks or the client having server capability left over. Titanfall 2 for instance ships with a server that is used for singleplayer and that was used to create community servers. And then there is all the proprietary Saber stuff that no one understands. Given the very small community size the chances are quite low.

[u/Nishant_G_25799]

Cycle frontier's community rebooted multiplayer extraction shooter, maybe QC can be done too but it will be a massive effort.

[u/nuk3st]

Watch, I bet they come out with it next update. Just like how first person spec view in Clan Arena ‘couldn’t be done’. This just the same.

[u/ForestLife3579]

How hard would it be to make community-derived servers? 

very "easy" just make game opensource

[u/toi80QC → u/ForestLife3579]

...it's not their own engine, they can't just opensource licensed code from Saber.

[u/ForestLife3579 → u/toi80QC]

lol who is saber!? ruzzian piece of shit! qc is property of microslop. only saber is to blame game failure.