3DGW's Tribes Server Setup Guide

Tribes Server Setup Guide
Last modified Thursday, December 02, 1999
By William Gall

Introduction
Whats New
Instlaling
Config File
Starting
Links

Introduction
This guide is in it's early stages so it may have some rough spots. If you see any mistakes, have any information that is missing, or have any questions please feel free to e-mail them to me. Like the origin of my Q2 Server Setup Guide this guide will be a journal of my experiences with 3DGW's own Tribes server (tribes.3dgw.com) at first.

This guide will talk you through setting up Tribes on a machine running Windows NT 4.0 with remote administration on both LAN and Internet. This doccument also assumes your machine is properly installed and you have a basic knowledge of Windows/NT and have the internet or Lan properly configured.

Whats New

March 26 - Started the first revision of The 3DGW Tribes Server Guide.

Installation
Installing the tribes server couldn't be easier. Either run setup off the cd or copy the tribes directory from a client computer to the server. There is only a full setup option that requires appoximatly 150 mb hard drive space. You will also want to get the latest tribes patch which can be found on our Tribes patch page.

Config Files
Like Quake 2 servers Tribes Servers are configured by editing a config file that is automatically loaded upon server startup. The config file is plain text file and can be edited in notepad or the dos edit program easily. You will want to create a new file called "serverConfig.cs" in your Tribes\config directory and put all the settings you want to set for your server in it. You should at least set the following settings:

$Server::HostName = "d0gmA's LAN Server";
Sets the Servers Host name which shows up in GameSpy and other server browsers.

$Server::MaxPlayers = "16";
Sets the maximum number of players allowed on the server at a time.

$AdminPassword = "BetterChangeMe";
Sets the Administrator password that will allow access to certain server administration functions.

$Server::HostPublicGame = "true";
Sets wether the game is public or not. Set to True if you are hosting a public internet server and set to false if you are hosting a LAN or Private Internet server.

$Server::Info = "Default TRIBES server\nAdmin: unkown\nEmail: unknown";
Sets some basica info about the server so clients know who to contact if they experinece problems while playing on your server.

$Server::JoinMOTD = "Message of the Day:\nWelcome to TRIBES!\n\nFire to spawn.";
Sets the Message of the Day that players see when they join your server.

$Server::Port = "28001";
Sets the port the server runs on. If you run multiple servers on the same machine you can set each one to use a different port.

$Server::TimeLimit = 20;
Sets the time between map changes.

$teamScoreLimit = "0";
Sets the maximum score a team can acchieve before triggering a map change. Setting this value to 0 means unlimited score.

$Server::AutoAssignTeams = "true";
Sets wether or not the server automatically assigns players to teams as the join.

$Console::LogMode = "1";
Sets console logging mode. 0=No Logging 1=immediate write 2=lazy write

$pref::PacketRate = "10";
Sets the packet rate.

$pref::PacketSize = "200";
Sets the packet size.

Server::loadMission("Raindance");
Sets the mission to load on startup.

Sample Config
Here I have included a sample of my ServerConfig.cs:

$Server::Address = "IP:198.111.200.15:28001";
$Server::Port = "28001";
$AdminPassword = "HaHaDontKidYourself";
$Server::Game = "Tribes";
$Server::HostName = "3DGW Tribes Server";
$Console::LogMode = "1";
$pref::PacketRate = "10";
$pref::PacketSize = "200";
$Server::MaxPlayers = "16";
$Server::TimeLimit = "20";
$teamScoreLimit = "0";
Server::loadMission("Raindance");

Starting the Server
Now that we have our server fully installed and configured it is time to start it up. You have a few options for starting the server depending on the situation and type of game you are hosting. If you are running a LAN server that will be local to you (i.e. you have access to the console), you can start the Tribes server from the command line. Simple open a dos box and change to the tribes directory and start the server with the following:

infiniteSpawn *tribes +exec serverConfig -dedicated

Infinate spawn is a program that will restart the server if it were to crash. InfinateSpawn will pop up GUI with a single Quit button you can use to shutdown your server with.

You can alternately run tribes directly from the command line without the infinateSpawn program with the following: