Hello
A couple of years ago I was messing with the bombgame server files released on this forum. I believe some of my older posts are probably still in this section.
Anyways I am posting to talk about an issue which a lot of players had, which was that they either couldn't log in to the server, or their progress wouldn't be saved after playing. Back then, I managed to get it working but didn't share the solution. I don't remember why I didn't share it, perhaps I was being greedy.
Anyways somebody added me to MSN today apparently from referral of KillerStefan (a moderator here) asking me how to fix it. I did help him and he got his server working.
So for anyone else who is playing with this server, so you don't have to try to contact me, here is what you need to do.
These steps are very simple, and anyone who is serious about hosting a server shouldn't have any problems.
- First of all make sure your server is turned off while doing this.
- Now in one of the configuration files (I dont remember the filename but you should be able to find it very easily), you need to make sure Accountneed is set to a 1. This means that it will use registered accounts when validating users who try to log into the server. If it's 0, then all users will be guests (which aren't saved). Once Accountneed is set to 1 save the file.
- The next step is to go into the SQL database and find the table called IB_GAMESERVERLIST, and set the values of every row in the IsActive column to a 0.
Now turn your server on and everything should work properly.
If you are interested, the reason why progress saving and account login was not working in the first place is because the accounts server was not connecting with the database properly. Because the values in the IsActive column on the IB_GAMESERVERLIST table were a 1 to begin with, they were set as being "already turned on" so to speak. So, when you turn on the server and it tries to initialize everything, it doesn't start because it thinks the server is on already (due to the 1 in the database) and so it does not start again.
The downside to this problem is that the server only sets that value back to a 0 when the server shuts down properly. This means, if your server crashes, then the value will still be a 1 in the database, and hence it won't start again the next time you turn the server on. You can easily fix this by writing your own auto server restart program, which you should make it detect if the server crashes, and if it does, it should set the IsActive value in the database back to a 0 for the server which crashed, and then restart that server again.
It was very simple to find that all of this was the source of the issues, after observing the packets transferred between the different server executables. If you use a packet sniffer or write a proxy program to see this for yourself it'll be very obvious to you too.
Anyways, server issues aside, the game itself is not that interesting. It's fun for something to do with some friends, but it's not something worth spending a lot of time on in my opinion. I also thing the game is a bit too simple and can get rather boring quickly.
However, the main thing I disliked about this game was that when you lose games, you also lose a lot of experience points. So basically losing a few games in a row can cause you to be further behind than you were before. You could possibly alter the server binaries though to prevent this if you are skilled enough -- if there was no exp loss for losing, the game would probably be better to play.
I know that this section of RageZone is rather dead but I hope that all this information was useful to somebody. Have a nice day.
-Reiko
A couple of years ago I was messing with the bombgame server files released on this forum. I believe some of my older posts are probably still in this section.
Anyways I am posting to talk about an issue which a lot of players had, which was that they either couldn't log in to the server, or their progress wouldn't be saved after playing. Back then, I managed to get it working but didn't share the solution. I don't remember why I didn't share it, perhaps I was being greedy.
Anyways somebody added me to MSN today apparently from referral of KillerStefan (a moderator here) asking me how to fix it. I did help him and he got his server working.
So for anyone else who is playing with this server, so you don't have to try to contact me, here is what you need to do.
These steps are very simple, and anyone who is serious about hosting a server shouldn't have any problems.
- First of all make sure your server is turned off while doing this.
- Now in one of the configuration files (I dont remember the filename but you should be able to find it very easily), you need to make sure Accountneed is set to a 1. This means that it will use registered accounts when validating users who try to log into the server. If it's 0, then all users will be guests (which aren't saved). Once Accountneed is set to 1 save the file.
- The next step is to go into the SQL database and find the table called IB_GAMESERVERLIST, and set the values of every row in the IsActive column to a 0.
Now turn your server on and everything should work properly.
If you are interested, the reason why progress saving and account login was not working in the first place is because the accounts server was not connecting with the database properly. Because the values in the IsActive column on the IB_GAMESERVERLIST table were a 1 to begin with, they were set as being "already turned on" so to speak. So, when you turn on the server and it tries to initialize everything, it doesn't start because it thinks the server is on already (due to the 1 in the database) and so it does not start again.
The downside to this problem is that the server only sets that value back to a 0 when the server shuts down properly. This means, if your server crashes, then the value will still be a 1 in the database, and hence it won't start again the next time you turn the server on. You can easily fix this by writing your own auto server restart program, which you should make it detect if the server crashes, and if it does, it should set the IsActive value in the database back to a 0 for the server which crashed, and then restart that server again.
It was very simple to find that all of this was the source of the issues, after observing the packets transferred between the different server executables. If you use a packet sniffer or write a proxy program to see this for yourself it'll be very obvious to you too.
Anyways, server issues aside, the game itself is not that interesting. It's fun for something to do with some friends, but it's not something worth spending a lot of time on in my opinion. I also thing the game is a bit too simple and can get rather boring quickly.
However, the main thing I disliked about this game was that when you lose games, you also lose a lot of experience points. So basically losing a few games in a row can cause you to be further behind than you were before. You could possibly alter the server binaries though to prevent this if you are skilled enough -- if there was no exp loss for losing, the game would probably be better to play.
I know that this section of RageZone is rather dead but I hope that all this information was useful to somebody. Have a nice day.
-Reiko
