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Multiplayer Manual for OpenTTD
==============================
1. Starting a Server
---------------------
- Click "multiplayer" on the startup screen
- Click "start server"
- Type in a game name
- Select the type of game ('LAN/Internet' or 'Internet (advertise)'. With the
last one other people are able to see you online. Else they need your IP and
port to join)
- Click "start game", "load game" or "load scenario"
- Start playing
2. Connecting to a Server
--------------------------
- Click "multiplayer" on the startup screen
- If you want to connect to any network game in your LAN click on 'LAN', then
on 'Find Server'
- If you want to see which servers all online on the Internet, click on
'Internet' and 'Find Server'
- If there were more than one server
- select one in the list below the buttons
- click on 'join game'
- If you want to play and you have the ip or hostname of the game server you
want connect to.
- click add server
- type in the ip address or hostname
- if you want to add a port use :<port>
- Now you can select a company and press: "Join company", to help that company
- Or you can press "Spectate game", to spectate the game
- Or you can press "New company", and start your own company (if there are
slots free)
- You see a progressbar how far you are with joining the server.
- Happy playing
3. Connecting to a Server over the Console
-------------------------------------------
- Open the console and type in the following command:
connect <ip/host>:<port>#<company-no>
4. Playing Internet-Games
--------------------------
- Servers with a red dot behind it have a different version then you have. You
will not be able to join those servers.
- Servers with a yellow dot behind it have NewGRFs that you do not have. You
will not be able to join those servers. However, via "NewGRF Settings" and
"Find missing content online" you might be able to download the needed
NewGRFs after which you can join the server.
- It can happen that a connection is that slow, or you have that many clients
connected to your server, that your clients start to loose their connection.
Some things you can do about it:
- [network] frame_freq:
change it in console with: 'set network.frame_freq <number>'
the number should be between the 0 and 10, not much higher. It indicates
the delay between clicking and showing up. The higher, the more you notice
it, but the less bandwidth you use.
A good value for Internet-games is 2 or 3.
- [network] sync_freq:
change it in console with: 'set network.sync_freq <number>'
the number should be between the 50 and 1000, not much lower, not much
higer. It indicates the time between sync-frames. A sync-frame is a frame
which checks if all clients are still in sync. When the value it too high,
clients can desync in 1960, but the server detects it in 1970. Not really
handy. The lower the value, the more bandwidth it uses.
NB: changing frame_freq has more effect on the bandwidth then sync_freq.
5. Tips for servers
--------------------
- You can launch a dedicated server by adding -D as parameter.
- In UNIX like systems, you can fork your dedicated server by adding -f as
parameter.
- You can automaticly clean companies that do not have a client connected to
them, for, let's say, 3 years. You can do this via: 'set autoclean_companies'
and 'set autoclean_protected' and 'set autoclean_unprotected'. Unprotected
removes a password from a company when it is not used for more then the
defined amount of months. 'set autoclean_novehicles' can be used to remove
companies without any vehicles quickly.
- You can also do this manually via the console: 'reset_company'.
- You can let your server automaticly restart a map when, let's say, year 2030
is reached. See 'set restart_game_date' for detail.
- If you want to be on the server-list, enable Advertising. To do this, select
'Internet (advertise)' in the Start Server menu, or type in console:
'set server_advertise 1'.
- You can protect your server with a password via the console: 'set server_pw',
or via the Start Server menu.
- When you have many clients connected to your server via Internet, watch your
bandwidth (if you have any limit on it, set by your ISP). One client uses
about 1.5 kilobytes per second up and down. To decrease this amount, setting
'frame_freq' to 1 will reduce it to roughly 1 kilobyte per second per client.
- OpenTTD's default settings for maximum number of clients, and amount of data
from clients to process are chosen to not influence the normal playing of
people, but to prevent or at least make it less likely that someone can
perform a (distributed) denial-of-service attack on your server by causing
an out-of-memory event by flooding the server with data to send to all
clients. The major factor in this is the maximum number of clients; with
32 clients "only" sending one chat message causes 1024 messages to be
distributed in total, with 64 clients that already quadruples to 4096. Given
that upstream bandwidth is usually the limiting factor, a queue of packets
that need to be sent will be created.
To prevent clients from exploiting this "explosion" of packets to send we
limit the number of incoming data, resulting in effectively limiting the
amount of data that OpenTTD will send to the clients. Even with the default
limits it is possible to generate about 70.000 packets per second, or about
7 megabit per second of traffic.
Given that OpenTTD kicks clients after they have not reacted within about 9
seconds from sending a frame update packet it would be possible that OpenTTD
keeps about 600.000 packets in memory, using about 50 megabytes of memory.
Given that OpenTTD allows short bursts of packets, you can have slightly
more packets in memory in case of a distributed denial of service attack.
When increasing the amount of incoming data, or the maximum number of
clients the amount of memory OpenTTD needs in case of a distributed denial
of service attack is linearly related to the amount of incoming data and
quadratic to the amount of clients. In short, a rule of thumb for, the
maximum memory usage for packets is:
#max_clients * #max_clients * bytes_per_frame * 10 KiB.
6. Some useful things
----------------------
- You can protect your company so nobody else can join uninvited. To do this,
set a password in your Company Screen
- You can give other players some money via the ClientList (under the 'head'
in the mainbar).
- You can chat with other players via ENTER or via SHIFT+T or via the ClientList
- Servers can now kick players, so don't make them use it!
7. Troubleshooting
------------------
- My advertising server does not show up in list at servers.openttd.org
Run openttd with the '-d net=2' parameter, as this will show whether it
receives replies from the master server. If it does not receive replies it
is most likely that you need to configure your router to forward ports
3979 (both TCP and UDP) to the computer that is hosting the game.
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