The popeyspades instances have moved!
Goodbye Linode Akami, hello Hetzner!
You shouldn’t (currently) notice any difference because I copied the entire configuration, maps, bans and admins over.
The only thing you may notice is the fact we’ve moved hosting from USA to Germany. That might be a problem as lag for some of the South American players, we shall see.
There are some changes coming though, more on that in a later post, another day.
What could possibly better than running an Ace of Spades / OpenSpades (piqueserver) instance?
Running two, obviously!
The existing “Good vs Evil” server is currently configured to rotate through a few maps. Each map runs until one team catches the flag ten times, or twenty-four hours elapses with no winner, whichever comes first.
This is a pretty common configuration on many⁺ of the servers online.
⁺ I say ‘many’ but there’s only ever about thirty servers online at any one time.
tl;dr: Server was down, now it’s back on line, running on Linode (affiliate link), with new maps and a new, extra admin.
It’s been a while!
You may recall I sparked up and Stress Tested Piqueserver on a Digital Ocean droplet (affiliate link) in April last year. It lasted about six months, then I had to shut it down. I had other things going on, and decided paying for a DO droplet for a game I wasn’t playing much didn’t make sense.
Last night, myself and my friend Martin decided to ‘stress test’ my popey spades server. I was keen to see if it could handle a bunch of people playing for an extended period, so put out a call to see of people wanted to spank either of us with a spade.
Turns out, I needn’t have bothered, because by the time I joined just before 10pm UK time, there were already 20 + people playing!
I mentioned in the Welcome post that I’m running piqueserver to play on. Piqueserver is an awesome free software implementation of the OpenSpades / Ace of Spades server.
It’s pretty configurable, so you can customise your server to have maps and game modes you prefer. It has server and team text chat, map voting and admin / moderation tools. It can also connect to an IRC channel to allow for server monitoring, and has an SSH remote access option.
Got a bit bored during the Great Lockdown of 2020 and found myself playing a bit of OpenSpades. One thing led to another, and I decided to spin up a server, create a discord and register a domain. So here we are.
You’ll find my server “Good Vs Evil” in the list, and can ‘favourite’ it with a right click of the mouse. Maybe I’ll see you there.
Most servers have “blue” and “green” teams, or words in polish I don’t understand.
OpenSpades OpenSpades is an Open Source Voxel first-person shooter. The source is on GitHub where there are releases for Windows and MacOS. I help maintain a snap of OpenSpades, which you can get from the Snap Store.
piqueserver piqueserver is an Open Source server based on PySnip. The source is on GitHub and has documentation in case you’d like to run your own server.
popey spades popeyspades is basically my own public server, running piqueserver, which I connect to with OpenSpades and play on with friends and random people on the Internet.
Get in touch The popey spades discord is the best place to keep in touch while we play.
You can also contact me via IRC - (I’m popey in #popeyspades on libera.chat), Twitter and Telegram.