i want to build a gaming server....what do i need?

[pyr0]

i am looking to build a gaming server and am wanting to achieve the goal of letting my friends connect and play games such as battlefield 2 together with the voice talk enabled and all...

now i am a n00b when it comes to online gaming but i see other companies wantign to charge for his and well im thinking of setting one up for jstu me and my friends......also with this "server" i wont be playing any games on it but i would liek to know what software is needed and so on...i currently have a crappy ol HP server that is hosting my website and my ftp so can i jsut buy a prog that will allow people to connect to the "server" version of the game.


any help would be great....


ty

pyr0

[Yawgm0th]

Software? The only software you'll need is the games being played and Windows XP or 2000. I guess you'll also need TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, or just the game's built-in voice.

As for hardware, that depends. How many players will be in the games? Also, are you sure you have enough bandwidth to support a gaming server?

[eat@joes]

Assuming you have more bandwidth than my current Comcast "High Speed" Cable, then you should also get a router that allows VPN passthrough. Not only does this make it easy to connect to game servers, but you can also share files and access the server easier. Of course then you would need a VPN server which you can get software for to run on your computer and set it up as a hub. I'm not sure what though. If there are going to be a lot of players you want a lot of ram. Enough hdd space for the game, game files, and windows. Enough cpu power to run it. In most cases you don't even need a video card to run the server unless you are actually playing the game on that computer as well. You can basically have a piece of crap running as a server on a high bandwidth internet line.

When I do LANs at my house and other places I have a 'server' that just happens to be my old computer. It's equipped with a 900Mhz PIII cpu. 512MB PC133 sdram. 20GB seagate. Windows 2000 Pro. Onboard ATI Rage (64MB). I host UT2k4, Starcraft, BF1942, BF:V, CS, Quake III, and some other crap. It runs just fine because all servers (for games) have to do is send small packets back and forth and with around 25 players avg. it's not a real big load for it. I'll probably end up using a newer computer though since at my next LAN I will be hosting BF2, CS:S and some other ram-hungry games. Although you can never go wrong with 48 hours of Starcraft...