AdminDomainPackagesPage

Custom Installation Packages

Domain Packages allow you to serve custom content for each game under GameCreate (if desired) instead of using the packages maintained by the GameCreate team.

For example, you may decide you need to serve your own copy of Counter-Strike (complete with your choice of maps, etc) across your servers.

This also allows you to serve custom content relative to where your hosts are located (such as an internal network or a host on the same network as your game hosts). This also means you receive the fastest installation speed possible for your content as the installation is between local servers instead of downloading from an external web server on the Internet.

Requirements

• Web server which can serve files as-is and not parse their contents over HTTP.

• GameCreate Package Builder (You may download this from the http://www.gamecreate.com/downloads.php Download Page)

Installation Guide

Important: You will require a level of technical proficiency in order to setup the content server system.

This guide will walk you through setting up a local distribution of Counter-Strike content to your server hosts.

For the purposes of this guide, it is assumed you have a HTTP Accessable web server located at http://www.example.com/content Note: This may be an internal host name or IP address on your local network, it does not need to be Internet accessible - just accessible by your game server hosts which will be downloading the content

To activate the content server for Counter-Strike and Half-Life installations, visit the Domain tab and click Packages.

This only needs to be done for a top level provider domain, subdomains will automatically inherit custom content package settings if not explicitly overridden by the subdomain.

On the Domain Packages tab tick the 'Enable the use of a custom content server' box.

Then enter the starting custom content server address, in our example, this would be: http://www.example.com/content

Place a tick beside 'Half-Life' and 'Counter-Strike' in the list that appears and click Save.

The content server supports both Windows and Linux installations of software (what GameCreate refers to as Packages).

The GameCreate Package Builder contains the following files:

• build-update.bat - Batch file script (if used on a Windows system) to call build-update.php with the appropriate parameters.

• build-update.php – Script which actually compiles the package installation revision information and communicates with GameCreate.

• build-update.config-default – Default configuration file for building updates, this must be renamed 'build-update.config' and edited inside to suite your domain(s).

• packages.txt – Plain text file containing the package information and which directories to in/exclude from each package

Upon opening build-update.php you will notice the line:

require "build-update.config";

This just retrieves the settings from the configuration file – by default this must be placed in the same directory as your build update script.

Your free to change the require path (eg,: require "/secret/build-update.config") in order to prevent the file being publicly accessible via your web server server as this file will contain your domain login information.

Place the included files under the /content directory on the web server.

Rename build-update.config-default to build-update.config, edit the file and use your domain login/password from the Domain Configuration tab in place of what is in the file. This is the same login and password used by your server hosts to login to your domain.

If you are running Linux hosts and wish to create a custom install of Counter-Strike 1.6, place the contents of your hlserver directory in: /content/linux/hlserver

Replace 'linux' with 'win32' if you are wanting to also distribute Windows files – Both can exist at the same time in their respective directories.

Now to build the update with the update script – this requires PHP5 (www.php.net) to be installed.

From the command line of the server type (for example):

php build-update.php hlserver

This will version the installation files for Half-Life.

Then we need to also version the 'cstrike' package:

php build-update.php cstrike

Make sure both of those are done.

Typing 'php' should work on its own, or specify the location to your php binary /usr/local/php for example if you are on Linux or C:\php\php.exe if you are on Windows.

Build-update.php is the script to run, and the last parameter is the package name, found in packages.txt

Counter-Strike is split up over two packages.

Half-Life (hlserver package name), which is the main installation of the Half-Life Dedicated Server, and then Counter-Strike (cstrike package name), which only contains the \cstrike subfolder.

When this script finishes, it should generate a file for each package under /content/linux/hlserver.txt and cstrike.txt

hlserver.txt/cstrike.txt contains the revision information GameCreate Client will use when told to install or update a game on a host.

If all went well, the script should finish and say without any warnings/errors: "Writing revision X’ and in brackets [X instruction revisions]."

You can then install the game via GameCreate Client and it will retrieve the content from your HTTP server, instead of the one provided by the GameCreate team.