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Turbolego
rank 1
Posted:
Wed Jan 15, 2014 3:41 pm
quote : #1
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Posts: 2
I was searching the web for a homebrew server to play Worms World Party on, and stumbled on this thread from 2005/2006:

http://dreamcast.onlineconsoles.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4966

What was the outcome?

(I can't reply in the thread, because i'm not admin.)
 
petterk
rank 9
Posted:
Tue Jan 21, 2014 2:13 pm
quote : #2
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Posts: 116
Type: PAL
Im wondering the same thing!

God i hope i get some of those awesome online games back....Apparently "Martin Randall" wrote the online part of the game. Maybe we should try contacting him?
  _________________
http://www.dcserv.org/
Turbolego
rank 1
Posted:
Tue Jan 21, 2014 2:22 pm
quote : #3
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Posts: 2
petterk wrote:
Im wondering the same thing!

God i hope i get some of those awesome online games back....Apparently "Martin Randall" wrote the online part of the game. Maybe we should try contacting him?


Let's send him letters.

Not emails.

Letters.

Perhaps ask here for a good strategy?

http://www.reddit.com/r/dreamcast/
 
petterk
rank 9
Posted:
Wed Jan 22, 2014 8:45 am
quote : #4
profile : pm
Posts: 116
Type: PAL
Hi,

so I was looking around on google and found the name "Martin Randall", who supposedly did the online part of Worms World Party for Dreamcast.


And so I emailed the guy after I found his email address somewhere.


I asked him how the servers operated, and what it takes (besides packetlogs) to get this up and running again.

This is Martin Randall's answer:

Quote:
Hi Petter,

Thanks for your email. I am the Martin Randall that worked on the Dreamcast version of Worms World Party. That was 14 years ago, so you will forgive me if my memory is a little rusty!

The online capabilities were in two phases – setting up an online game and actually playing the game once a host and guests had been established. I mostly worked on the first phase which was part of the user-interface at the start of the game. The WormsNet server was basically a standard IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server – as far as I recall, there were no changes to this at all. The client software in the game’s frontend sent messages using the IRC protocol to set-up rooms, chat to others that were also online and set up games. Rather than send plain text in IRC, the messages were pre-encoded so that the clients could distinguish commands (such as host a game, join a game, start a game, etc.) from general chat. All this logic is encoded in the game software so in theory you don’t need to worry about that if you point them to a standard IRC server. Once a game had been hosted and other players joined (using IRC messages to keep everyone in sync), a final ‘start game’ command was sent from the host and the clients received this. The host/client information was passed onto the game code which then handled the communication between hosts and clients to do a network game.

I don’t recall the syntax of the IRC commands that were sent, but as I said – you should not need to know this as it is all in the code that extended the IRC client software in the game itself.

That’s as much as I recall – it was all a long time ago. Good luck with the project and let me know if you have any success.

Cheers,
Martin Randall
  _________________
http://www.dcserv.org/
Dreamcast ™
rank 39
Posted:
Wed Jan 22, 2014 9:16 am
quote : #5
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Posts: 923
Type: NTSC-U/C
I can confirm this. I had set up an IRC server as he described few years ago and you can get as far as setting up a game, but if I remember correctly, you can configure the game but it won't show up for other players or other players that join are invisible to each other. Whichever the case was, a game can't be started for some reason. The best reason so far is that there may have been a bot on the channel that had some part in the process.
 
petterk
rank 9
Posted:
Wed Jan 22, 2014 10:16 am
quote : #6
profile : pm
Posts: 116
Type: PAL
Anyone up for a challenge? See if it actually works?

I cant as my 230->110v transformer for my phoneline-simulator is dead atm, but should be able to get a new one in a couple of days.

Anyone in?
  _________________
http://www.dcserv.org/
petterk
rank 9
Posted:
Wed Jan 22, 2014 2:42 pm
quote : #7
profile : pm
Posts: 116
Type: PAL
Im not in here that much, but for those of you that want to follow this project, please check out the following topics for updates:

http://dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6059
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?49813
  _________________
http://www.dcserv.org/
lordnikon
rank 87
Posted:
Sat Jan 25, 2014 5:46 am
quote : #8
profile : pm
Posts: 5902
Type: NTSC-U/C
Please feel free to post about this type of subject matter over at OF Project:

http://xrz87.org/ofproject/bbs/index.php

OC has had a long standing rule to keep these types of topics off the boards, so that the site remains focused on playing existing games online, and celebrating the great memories of past games. A long time ago I had promissed to set up a seperate area to discuss this stuff, but it kept falling to the back of my list. With these recent posts I made it a priority to get that area setup and OF Project moved (so that it could cover all systems, including PC).

A board is now up for people to use for discussing getting games back online.

Enjoy!
  _________________
I'm already numero uno on Dark Helmet's hit list...
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