Multiple Freelancer Servers
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Hi All,
I’ve been running a server for quite a while now and my biggest issue has been the reliability of equipment to host a server. More specifically, the router. In my experience, my server has gone offline mainly because of router failures, two in the last six months. Router problems aside, my question is how do I host more than one server? I am running my server using VirtualBox and a base install of winXP (No updates). I have been unable to get a server working on any version of Windows newer than XP and since I find trying to install XP on a 64bit machine futile, I am left with running the server from a virtual machine. This system has worked well for me but I want to host another virtual machine as well as the first. The problem for me is the instructions that came with Freelancer:
How to Control the Port Number that the Freelancer Server Uses
The Freelancer server normally picks its own port (in the range of 2302–2400) when hosting a game. This works well in most cases. However, there are situations where you may want to control the port choice for the server. These situations are usually caused by running more than one DirectPlay game on your network at a time.
You can control the port selection with the /P command line option to the FLServer.exe program. For example, if you wanted to have the server host on port 1234, you would use the following command line FLServer.exe /P1234. You can easily modify the provided shortcut to FLServer.exe to include this option. Simply edit the Target line and add your own /Pxxx after the FLServer.exe text.
I assume that when they say “Edit” they mean that I should right click on the Freelancer icon and go to properties and then go to the “Target” line and edit that line so that /Pxxxx appears AFTER Freelancer.exe but BEFORE the quotation mark. But when I do that, a nice Windows message comes up and says: The name ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\EXE\Freelancer.exe /p2303’ specified in the target box is not valid. Make sure the path and the filename are correct.
The instructions seem to be easy… but I know I am doing something wrong, I just don’t know what…
Deep Sigh,
Tanamir -
As you have noticed, you can force the port the server uses by starting with these command line options: /c /p2302
- /c skip over the server start screen
- /p sets the port.
You could consider using dspm to automatically start your server. This will pass the options to the server correctly. Find it here http://forge.the-starport.net/projects/dspm
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The quotes are used to treat the spaces literally, rather than as a separator between the program and its arguments. Thus you want to place the option after the quote: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\EXE\Freelancer.exe” /p2303 and “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\EXE\Flserver.exe” /c /p2303.
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Tanamir wrote:
…I assume that when they say “Edit” they mean that I should right click on the Freelancer icon and go to properties and then go to the “Target” line and edit that line so that /Pxxxx appears AFTER Freelancer.exe but BEFORE the quotation mark. But when I do that, a nice Windows message comes up and says: The name ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\EXE\Freelancer.exe /p2303’ specified in the target box is not valid. Make sure the path and the filename are correct.
The instructions seem to be easy… but I know I am doing something wrong, I just don’t know what…
Deep Sigh,
TanamirNot Feelancer.exe - you need flserver.exe
You can control the port selection with the /P command line option to the FLServer.exe program. For example, if you wanted to have the server host on port 1234, you would use the following command line FLServer.exe /P1234. You can easily modify the provided shortcut to FLServer.exe to include this option. Simply edit the Target line and add your own /Pxxx after the FLServer.exe text.
“Provided shortcut” means start - programs - microsoft games - freelancer - flserver - right click - edit
Something like this.
