how to host LAN games

ive just reinstalled winbolo after a clean win7 install. now i cant host lan games but before the install i could?

this is the message i get:

starting game servers from within the winbolo client on windows vista (or later) does not work correctly and has been disabled.

if you wish to start a new game server please you the dedicated server.

it says it doesnt work and has been disabled but i know it does work ive just forgotton what i did :/

Open a command prompt, navigate to the winbolo directory, and run winbolods.exe from there. Read the usage syntax. An example would be:

C:\Program Files\WinBolo>winbolods.exe -port 27500 -gametype strict -map "maps\chew toy 3.map" -tracker tracker.winbolo.com:50000

For quick hosting of games, I created a batch script with some default settings. If I want to start a 1.17 server with a custom password, I'll save the following in a batch file and then just double-click it when I want to start a new game.

[code:1:97266d9cfd]"F:\Games\WinBolo\winbolo117\winbolods.exe" -map "F:\Games\WinBolo\Maps\Buzzsaw.map" -port 27500 -gametype strict -tracker tracker.winbolo.net:50000 -log -quitonwin -password n0cheats[/code:1:97266d9cfd]

The upside is that you can start a map quicker than typing it in every time. The downside is that you will manually have to adjust the map name each time you run the script.

Is there a way to allow users to generate and run a script to select their own map? I assume there are some serious security implications.

Anyway, it would be very easy to write an app. to run the specific maps you want. You could even serve the app. on the web from your computer as a web page (e.g. ASP.NET) but that might affect the resources required by the server itself.


How much does serving a winbolo game take from the computer's resources?

ErYan wrote:

Is there a way to allow users to generate and run a script to select their own map? I assume there are some serious security implications.

I don't think there would be any serious security issues other than what is already connected to running a web server.

The way you would accomplish this would be similar to how the bots in IRC build and run their commands: with parameters. You'd essentially have a page that has a bunch of drop-down menus for things like the game type, mines, bots, password, time limit, etc.

The path to the WinBolo server, the path to the maps, and the map names are the only things that would be text boxes. This data the user would have to provide. Yes, there might be some security issues there but I'm sure there's a way to scrub the data. Then just call a concatenation function and it outputs the string for use in a batch file.

Or, you can use a GUI front end program to run the WinBolo server. WinBoloDSFE was a program that Canuck wrote years ago. I probably still have it. I believe SuicidJky also wrote a server front-end in Visual Basic as well.