My friend recently got Freelancer and we were discussing playing it together on a server he will make - he has a LAN with an extra machine.
I am wondering what you need to run the server decently - it will only be the two of us but I do know the game has a lot of overhead in running all the NPC ships and such. I tried hosting my own server on my single machine but between the server and the game the performance was choppy.
On Tom’s server, it ran quite well (when there was no 'net lag) for 1 or 2 players but became fairly laggy with 3 or more.
Case’s server seemed to run quite nicely with 5 or 6 guys on it. (Although Alan had that WEIRD ship-upgrade bug)
I actually ran the Qt3 server as a closed server for a friend of mine and I for about 3 weeks after Tom closed up shop.
I ran it on a Via C3 800 with 384MB of RAM running windows XP. The stand alone server program worked great. We never had more than 3 users (one on the LAN, 2 over the Internet) but didn’t run into much lag (my DSL is a 1.5M downstream / 384k upstream connection, and 2 users didn’t seem to saturate the 384k to the point that they experiences much lag).
I’d be happy to set it up again for tolerance tests with multiple users if you’d like. I think the key is the bandwidth – IIRC, Tom’s server only had about 90k of upstream, which is why it got laggy with lots of users. I can only assume Loyd has multiple T3s running into his basement/PC lab/evil scientist’s lair, which is probably why it ran fine on his server.
I’ve still got the Qt3 server files, too, if you want 'em.
