So, you want to host a RUNNING WITH RIFLES dedicated server? Sure, now you can! Modulaatio Games will be ever grateful for your awesome help in delivering RWR online battles to places unknown (like US)!

RWR server build 0.71.1 is compatible with RWR (the game) beta 0.71. The build itself is distributed freely as gzip/zip, no installers, no Desura or BMTMicro needed for this so updates will be quick and numerous. Note that you do need the media content from the actual game.

Not a lot of data exists of what computer specs you would need to run the RWR server, but here's something:
* RAM won't be a problem, RWR server uses less than 50MB RAM
* RWR basically runs in one thread, so one core is definitely enough, unless you're doing other serious multitasking on the system
* 2GHz CPU can definitely run RWR without problems, you should see CPU usage around 10-20% mostly (with e.g. top in Linux); in that sense, even 1GHz should pull it off ok

Linux
* download http://modulaatio.com/runningwithrifles ... _0.71.1.gz
* refer to setup guide for Ubuntu

WIndows
* download http://modulaatio.com/runningwithrifles ... 0.71.1.zip
* unzip to a folder, copy media-folder from the actual game (C:\Program Files (x86)\Desura\Common\running-with-rifles\media if you're a Desura user or C:\Program Files (x86)\Running with rifles\media if you're a Desura standalone / BMTMicro user, by default) to the folder too and run
* dependent libraries are included in the zip, except Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 runtime; chances are you already have it




As we are just getting started with dedicated servers here, the feature set is pretty basic and heavily inherited from the usual GUI game match hosting. On top of the usual, launch a new game, start/stop a server, change the map, show general status, player list, view chat log, say globally, you can also kick players off the server from the console. More fancy features will be implemented in the future, and suggestions are always welcome!

One of the inherited things at this point you'll surely notice is that the dedicated server is also one of the players in the game This will be cleaned up soonish, so expect to see it fixed in 0.71.2 or so.

Just a suggestion:

I would highly suggest spending a few dollars on a VPS in each major geographic location and hosting an official server there. With this done new players will see that the game isn't dead in the water when they try to get online. I will personally be setting up a US East server shortly but at this point there are no servers online and I never play this game because of this.

Just my two cents and keep up the great work!

joejoe provided 2 dedicated servers in the US, which is great beause many RWR players are from the US, according to the sales. Those servers are now offline since a few days because he seems to have some troubles with the hosting company (this should hopefully be fixed soon).
I agree that every major geographic location should have at least one dedicated to start with (Asia and Oceania since US and EU are covered already). Later we'd need even more servers but for now it would be enough since, as you already mentioned, the online community isn't really crowded as for now.

My thoughts about empty servers are less the lack of dedicated servers because 2-3 of them would be enough to let a few dozens players have fun than the fact that just a handful of people are using the RWRWatcher tool (or the serverlist URL) to get informed if someone is actually playing.
People usually don't bother starting the game, go to online games to browse the list of servers to see that the servers are often empty. That is why I highly recommand to download the RWRWatcher (it doesn't need to be installed, just placed in your game directory).

Getting people know that others are playing is a cumbersome topic, when regular players are relatively scarce. RWRW sounds very good to me personally, but my concern is that maybe most people don't want another background process running for checking this stuff, I do hope I'm just wrong about that. Getting RWRW download links and website page up should obviously happen before any upcoming game promotion, to make sure newcomers and comebackers are made aware of RWRW then if RWR gets some new coverage. However, even RWRW won't help if all the players just wait for it to tell that others are now playing on a server, as then no one takes the initiative to actually join a server to notify others.

Any other ideas how to invite people to play and at the same time? We've tried the Big match -event a few times, it has been fairly successful with player count ranging from 10-20, but even that sounds a bit low count as it's under 1% of the total player base. Big matches have been announced in the blog (RSS feed), twitter, Desura, the forum, but it sometimes seems these are not the best ways to reach out to the existing players. Would someone actually use a mailing list rather than the channels already mentioned?