Alien Front Online Server Update: Now Online

[petter3k]

Big shoutout to Shouma for helping me with testing and figuring out some stuff removed, first thought to be unrelated to AFO (but other games) and with the bugs affecting the final version of the game.

[Gary_b]

The wiki says that it is revived, are we now able to play AFO online, or are there still things holding us back?

[petter3k]

It is revived, only not deployed yet. So, probably very soon.

[The-Amazing-Mr_V]

I'll have to order this game ASAP! Always wanted to play it.

[Nico0020]

My BBA is ready. Has someone already made the iso? Does voice chat work for dreampi users?

Sent from my SCL21 using Tapatalk

[petter3k]

I doubt there exist any AFO iso or release with the *added* support so some extra work is *probably* needed and will be announced once ready....I assume

[Xiden]

I doubt there exist any AFO iso or release with the *added* support so some extra work is *probably* needed and will be announced once ready....I assume

Just out of curiosity, would this server software also be used to get the Sega Sports titles to come back online? Don't they also use "SNAP" or "KAGE"?

[Boonz]

I tried to play my copy of AFO today - it is not readable anymore :O
Need to get a new one asap,also noticed that my mic protector got from green to a brownish color :/
Have to check my Seaman mic ;D

[Shuouma]

Big shoutout to Shouma for helping me with testing and figuring out some stuff removed, first thought to be unrelated to AFO (but other games) and with the bugs affecting the final version of the game.

My pleasure

[petter3k]

Just out of curiosity, would this server software also be used to get the Sega Sports titles to come back online? Don't they also use "SNAP" or "KAGE"?

Partly. While I havent really had the time to look into each and every one of them (like successors and such) they used some of the same setup, while some of it where developed in-house at Visual Concepts. During development they skipped the whole lobby-server and connected straight to the other consoles. This feature is ofcourse not in the final release of the games.
The server for these titles are mainly just a lobby and really not dependent on dedicated game servers. So while, say, Outtrigger or Alient Front Online is played on actual game servers, most (if not all) sports titles are Peer2Peer, like WWP and probably others. How do I know this? Well, packet logs and actual dialogs with the developers, which all confirm this. There might be exceptions, but I doubt it. VC and BSI which created most of the NBA/NFL/WSB actually use a similar setup to this day, and the setup they used was handed to them, and they all say it looks like it was developed in-house at VC - not using SEGAs system as it was probably not needed. There are pros and cons in doing stuff like this through either dedicated game servers, or just pairing players up against each other, but I wont get into that right now.

What is odd is that while the sports titles created at VC used this approach, the servers or system used for Ooga Booga! is entirely different with strong encryption (a game were the developers was willing to help - but got a "no-go" from the president of VC since this code officially belongs to SEGA) where the developers actually have their hands on everything needed to get this up and running again with official setup, but were unsure if they really knew where the encryption keys were stored, if they still had them at all - so this is an example of a game (of entirely different genre ofcourse), but with a different setup, developed by the same company.

The same goes for Propeller Arena - which most people thought were running on the same (game) servers as Outtrigger, something it did not do even though they shared the same KAGE server for the initial request to the bootstrap server, but the main difference between the two is that this game uses encryption aswell, while Outtrigger does not - and was probably redirected to what may have been identical servers for all I know, but because of a different GameID, was redirected to its own game servers. I should add that I have not dug very deep in this game nor Ooga Booga because of the encryption - thats not to say that revival is COMPLETELY out of the picture, but requires alot of resources and information aswell as decrypting the packets without the keys for it - which is quite a bit of work.

However, WinCE games licensed through Microsoft was pushed in the DPlay direction which is a different stack, and while WWP use P2P through a lobby, which wasn't really their original plan of doing things as they first used a RAS setup on Windows Servers with SQL-handling but which turned out to be a huge pain in the ass to both maintain, deploy and debug, an alternative setup was used with P2P and a IRC-server with an Eggdrop-bot for broadcasting game info to players connecting/connected. You can read more about this in the WWP page at the DC Wiki. Hope that answers your question.

However, once everything is documented, and tested, a page at the DC Wiki will be created with info about both the sports titles and KAGE(and its evolution into SNAP), aswell as the newly written replacement system created by DCSERV.org.