QSD: Game Server Daemon

May 12, 2001

There hasn't been too much going on in the world of QSD recently. Mostly some cleanups and fixes. I just thought I'd let everyone know that not much will be happening for the next couple days. Today is commencement for Engineering majors and tomorrow is the campus wide commencement so I will be busy graduating. And Monday through Wednesday I will be in California interviewing for a real job. Wish me luck. =)
--rhavyn

May 4, 2001

Big news here, the CVS version of QSD will now actually start a server. Unfortunately for all of you, there is no documentation on how to make this happen (unless you want to read the source). If you really, really want to get QSD up and running, send me an email and I can send you some stuff to get you started. And another problem, for now there is no client. So, if there is anyone who might be interested in coding up a client, drop me a line ASAP. I have some ideas of how a client library might be written (for *nix at least). I also know someone who is thinking about working on a Win32 client. Any Win32 hackers can drop me a line as well and I can get you in touch with him if he decides to go ahead with it. Now, go get the source and tell me what you think.
--rhavyn

April 30, 2001

Lots of updates in CVS tonight. Unfortunately, my internet connection is really sucking which is making it difficult for me to make sure that everything is now up to date. If you run across something that doesn't want to compile, let me know, it probably means that I messed up. Otherwise, the beginnings of the server monitor are there and the logging is now done via syslog. I also cleaned up just about everything. For now, I'm gonna go bitch to Time Warner about how much RoadRunner blows.
--rhavyn

April 24, 2001

Well, I'm finally done with my projects. If anyone's interested, one of them won an IEEE Best Implementation award. So, now I can finally dedicate time to QSD again. I will be finishing the changes I wanted to make to to the server monitor thread this week. Once that is done, the foundation for a server plugin will be done (if anyone has any suggestions of what server I should do first, let me know ... and FYI, Half Life is already out of the question) and all that will be left to make QSD usable (from the servers point of view at least) is the code to format and send a response to a client. If anyone out there is interested at taking a hack at writing a client, please let me know so that we can start to lay out how the client library API might look.
--rhavyn

April 18, 2001

It looks like visible updates to QSD will not be evident for a few days for two reasons. The first is I've decided to handle forking and execing game servers in a completely new way which (in some ways) will make the code cleaner but which requires retooling some stuff. Basically, I'm going to fork a process during startup that will handling starting and restarting servers. Getting the fork and exec out of the main program means I don't need to worry about the nastiness of pthreads + fork and exec. So I'll be working on that till at least sometime next week and I don't like checking in code that won't compile and at least start running. The second reason is I'm going to be stuck in a lab for the next 48 hours getting all my projects finished for Saturday. All in all, not a fun week for me. =(
--rhavyn

April 18, 2001

Things are moving pretty slowly recently. Unfortunately, I've been bogged down with my senior design project (for anyone who is interested, I'm writing the PC display software for a side scanning sonar) and trying to find a job. Fortunately, senior design presentations are on the 21st and after that I'll have much more time to dedicate to QSD.
Now that I've bitched about how busy I am, things are still moving pretty smoothly. If you take a look at the most recent CVS stuff, an authentication module is there. Currently, it can handle a login (it will validate a user through a PostgreSQL database) and will generate the return hash. The request thread doesn't have the functionality to send the hash back to the client though.
Finally, I'm definitely interested in getting feedback from any developers out there who might have taken a look at this code. It's pretty slow going by myself and hearing if anyone's having any luck getting QSD to run would be great (run being a relative term right now =). For now, I'm back to coding.
--rhavyn

April 10, 2001

Two updates in one day, how bout that. Just thought that everyone would like to know that the QSD source code is now in CVS. For information on getting from CVS, go to the project page and check the directions in the CVS section.
--rhavyn

April 10, 2001

Just a quick update today. The request parser seems to be working reasonably well, although it's still incomplete (the command set hasn't been fully fleshed out yet). So, now I'm gonna be working on getting an authentication module hacked together.
--rhavyn

April 5, 2001

Unfortunately, this page still sucks, but QSD 0.1 is released (or will be as soon as I get it uploaded). This new release isn't significantly different from 0.0, but the backend code has mostly stabalized (I hope). The following features need to be written before even approaching a 1.0 release:
Authentication modules
Server modules
Handlers for the different commands that the request parser can take
The module interface needs to be stabalized (it currently hasn't even really been started)
Please remember, this is a developers only release. It is currently not usable. For anyone looking for a project to help with, this is a great time to hop onboard and start playing. For now, back to hacking.
--rhavyn

February 12, 2001

Well, this web page currently sucks but I don't really have time to do much better. Anyways, the first source release of QSD is available here. It's not usable at all and is not even nearly feature complete, but there is a good amount of code there. About 90% of the backend code is done, all that is really left is handling a request and writing modules (and yes, I realize that I'm probably underestimating what needs to be done). I'm looking for contributors and people who want to try some really pre-alpha code. Please, please feel free to send email to me about any comments or suggestions you might have. I am really excited about this project and promise to try and get this page looking somewhat better in the near future (if anyone out there wants to help, let me know).
--rhavyn

May 12, 2001
There hasn't been too much going on in the world of QSD recently. Mostly some cleanups and fixes. I just thought I'd let everyone know that not much will be happening for the next couple days. Today is commencement for Engineering majors and tomorrow is the campus wide commencement so I will be busy graduating. And Monday through Wednesday I will be in California interviewing for a real job. Wish me luck. =) --rhavyn
May 4, 2001
Big news here, the CVS version of QSD will now actually start a server. Unfortunately for all of you, there is no documentation on how to make this happen (unless you want to read the source). If you really, really want to get QSD up and running, send me an email and I can send you some stuff to get you started. And another problem, for now there is no client. So, if there is anyone who might be interested in coding up a client, drop me a line ASAP. I have some ideas of how a client library might be written (for *nix at least). I also know someone who is thinking about working on a Win32 client. Any Win32 hackers can drop me a line as well and I can get you in touch with him if he decides to go ahead with it. Now, go get the source and tell me what you think. --rhavyn
April 30, 2001
Lots of updates in CVS tonight. Unfortunately, my internet connection is really sucking which is making it difficult for me to make sure that everything is now up to date. If you run across something that doesn't want to compile, let me know, it probably means that I messed up. Otherwise, the beginnings of the server monitor are there and the logging is now done via syslog. I also cleaned up just about everything. For now, I'm gonna go bitch to Time Warner about how much RoadRunner blows. --rhavyn
April 24, 2001
Well, I'm finally done with my projects. If anyone's interested, one of them won an IEEE Best Implementation award. So, now I can finally dedicate time to QSD again. I will be finishing the changes I wanted to make to to the server monitor thread this week. Once that is done, the foundation for a server plugin will be done (if anyone has any suggestions of what server I should do first, let me know ... and FYI, Half Life is already out of the question) and all that will be left to make QSD usable (from the servers point of view at least) is the code to format and send a response to a client. If anyone out there is interested at taking a hack at writing a client, please let me know so that we can start to lay out how the client library API might look. --rhavyn
April 18, 2001
It looks like visible updates to QSD will not be evident for a few days for two reasons. The first is I've decided to handle forking and execing game servers in a completely new way which (in some ways) will make the code cleaner but which requires retooling some stuff. Basically, I'm going to fork a process during startup that will handling starting and restarting servers. Getting the fork and exec out of the main program means I don't need to worry about the nastiness of pthreads + fork and exec. So I'll be working on that till at least sometime next week and I don't like checking in code that won't compile and at least start running. The second reason is I'm going to be stuck in a lab for the next 48 hours getting all my projects finished for Saturday. All in all, not a fun week for me. =( --rhavyn
April 18, 2001
Things are moving pretty slowly recently. Unfortunately, I've been bogged down with my senior design project (for anyone who is interested, I'm writing the PC display software for a side scanning sonar) and trying to find a job. Fortunately, senior design presentations are on the 21st and after that I'll have much more time to dedicate to QSD. Now that I've bitched about how busy I am, things are still moving pretty smoothly. If you take a look at the most recent CVS stuff, an authentication module is there. Currently, it can handle a login (it will validate a user through a PostgreSQL database) and will generate the return hash. The request thread doesn't have the functionality to send the hash back to the client though. Finally, I'm definitely interested in getting feedback from any developers out there who might have taken a look at this code. It's pretty slow going by myself and hearing if anyone's having any luck getting QSD to run would be great (run being a relative term right now =). For now, I'm back to coding. --rhavyn
April 10, 2001
Two updates in one day, how bout that. Just thought that everyone would like to know that the QSD source code is now in CVS. For information on getting from CVS, go to the project page and check the directions in the CVS section. --rhavyn
April 10, 2001
Just a quick update today. The request parser seems to be working reasonably well, although it's still incomplete (the command set hasn't been fully fleshed out yet). So, now I'm gonna be working on getting an authentication module hacked together. --rhavyn
April 5, 2001
Unfortunately, this page still sucks, but QSD 0.1 is released (or will be as soon as I get it uploaded). This new release isn't significantly different from 0.0, but the backend code has mostly stabalized (I hope). The following features need to be written before even approaching a 1.0 release: Authentication modules Server modules Handlers for the different commands that the request parser can take The module interface needs to be stabalized (it currently hasn't even really been started) Please remember, this is a developers only release. It is currently not usable. For anyone looking for a project to help with, this is a great time to hop onboard and start playing. For now, back to hacking. --rhavyn
February 12, 2001
Well, this web page currently sucks but I don't really have time to do much better. Anyways, the first source release of QSD is available here. It's not usable at all and is not even nearly feature complete, but there is a good amount of code there. About 90% of the backend code is done, all that is really left is handling a request and writing modules (and yes, I realize that I'm probably underestimating what needs to be done). I'm looking for contributors and people who want to try some really pre-alpha code. Please, please feel free to send email to me about any comments or suggestions you might have. I am really excited about this project and promise to try and get this page looking somewhat better in the near future (if anyone out there wants to help, let me know). --rhavyn