Seb Lee-Delisle

Anyone playing my Lunar Lander game won’t know it, but we’re spying on them! The game gets around 20,000 hits a month, which is very roughly one a minute or so, so I thought it’d be the perfect vehicle to test out some real-time gaming techniques.

I’ve replaced the original game with one that transmits your position to ElectroServer, although you won’t notice any difference at all. The only way to see the all the current players is via the swf below :
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Further news to report on my ElectroServer adventures! I’ve now got an ES4 installation up and running on a MediaTemple Dedicated Virtual server. It was actually pretty easy too, thanks to this tutorial from Greg Sidbury.

I had no problems following although there are a couple of bits that confused me. The first was that the download link didn’t work so I just found the Linux RPM link on the ElectroServer download pages and used that, which for the current version is :

wget http://electro-server.com/downloads/builds/ElectroServer_4_0_6_linux.rpm

The other thing that got me is that I put in the domain name into the ES4Configuration.xml which didn’t work. I should have put the ip address for the virtual server (which you should find in your Media Temple account or you could always just ping your domain from a terminal window).

Once I’d opened the ports and started the server running I tried to telnet in to port 9898 (the default chat port) but it was refused. So I edited the crossdomain.xml on the main webserver to include the IP address of my home internet connection and it seemed to be OK after that. (At least I think that’s what fixed it!).

So apart from a few minor hassles it was pretty seamless and only took me an hour or so. I must admit to feeling way out of my depth, this isn’t something I’m particularly expert on so please feel free to comment with further advice

What else to do in the Christmas holidays but finally get my head around ElectroServer? Of course the first (sometimes significant) hurdle in getting started with any multi-user technology is just installing the server on your machine! ElectroServer4 (ES4) is Java based so it should work on OSX, but most of the documentation is for Windows, so I spent today installing it on my MacBook and thought I would share what I learned.

ES4 runs on Java 1.6 and OSX is shipped with 1.5. You can find instructions on getting the update here, but whatever you do don’t complete the steps to make 1.6 the default Java Virtual Machine (JVM), otherwise FlexBuilder won’t work any more!

Now you need to download the Unix package (the one marked “without JVM”) on the ElectroServer downloads page, and unzip it somewhere suitable (I put it in my documents folder).

Then open up a terminal window and navigate into the folder where you unzipped it. (Handy shortcut : type “cd” followed by a space and then drag the folder from the finder onto your terminal where the full path name will be inserted).

There’s a file in here called ElectroServer that you run but you need to tell it where to find the latest JVM. According to this rather useful thread you can do this by typing :

export INSTALL4J_JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home/

And then start the server normally by typing :

./ElectroServer

At which point you should see the happy message :

16:28:08,523 [main] INFO  DisplayLogger  - 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Starting ElectroServer 4.0.6
Go to http://www.electro-server.com/ for the newest version.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Computer Information
	Operating System: Mac OS X
	Operating System Architecture: x86_64
	Processors Available: 2
	Memory Available: 682Mb
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Virtual Machine Information
	Virtual Machine Vendor: Apple Inc.
	Virtual Machine Version: 1.6.0_17
 
 
16:28:14,863 [pool-1-thread-1] INFO  DisplayLogger  - 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
ElectroServer has started successfully

After several hours of fiddling around this was somewhat of a relief.

The next problem was that I couldn’t navigate to the admin panel which by default you can find at 127.0.0.1:8080/admin. But whenever I pointed my browser at it all I got was an empty binary file in my downloads folder. Thank goodness for Twitter where Matt Bolt saved the day with his tweet :

@sebleedelisle Make sure you’re using https, not http – I run into this constantly

Thank you Matt! I have no idea how I would have figured that one out without you! So I just navigated to https://127.0.0.1:8080/admin and it worked.

I expect to be furthering my adventures in ElectroServer over the next few days so I’ll keep you informed of how I get along.