Old Timer from Doom, Quake and Unreal

Until I just recently decided to build a gaming rig and found Xonotic (because I'm a Linux guy), the last time I played games was years ago with TF2 and Portal, but I go back with FPS games to pre-internet days with Duke Nukem, then DOOM over serial cable, then Quake with Team Fortress, then Q3A on dialup playing instagib, etc. I ran a UT2k4 server called Ug's Cave back in 2005 before I got out of gaming to pursue a career in EE. These days, I develop an Internet traffic shaping appliance for large enterprise data centers (low ping, traffic leveling, cost reduction. etc).

So, while looking for an arena-style FPS for my son and I to play and hoping to only run on our Linux boxes, I found Xonotic, and I'M IMPRESSED!  But I'm also disappointed that this project has been going for such a long time, never properly launched, and while it is very good now, it's lost most of it's popularity and is dying out! That's messed up!! I mean, for one, arena style FPS is still very viable! My 13 year-old boy, who only knew console games, was absolutely blown away with the level of gameplay here with Xonotic! Today's youth doesn't get how cool FPS was in its heyday. I still hate the game console as a serious game platform.

I'm in Atlanta, and as I browse Xonotic servers, I see very few players on servers that offer low pings here in the USA. Why?  Lack of good pure (and 0.8.2) servers with great map collections? Lack of good USA servers? Americans moved on to better things?

So, I have gigabit fiber at home. I have way more computers on my home network than I need. So, I started up Ug's Cave [Atlanta]: two servers with a few good polished maps in addition to the stock maps: one pure server with gametype and maptype voting, and the other server with Instagib and Hook (still pure, I guess).

They have been running for a couple of weeks now, and I don't check in much, but on the first hour I fired them up, the gametype votable one started filling up. That's surprising. I just popped in today for the first time in a week and that server was full.  

Is there any chance Xonotic could make a comeback? wonder how?

- Rob

Welcome! My server is in Virginia (AWS) but I just realized it was down. I'll fix it later on. Check out stats.xonotic.org -- people are playing the game, but right now the cluster is mostly in EU.

Welcome! My server is in Virginia (AWS) but I just realized it was down. I'll fix it later on. Check out stats.xonotic.org -- people are playing the game, but right now the cluster is mostly in EU.

Thanks, Buddy!

Twice today I saw my server go from full to almost empty when the minideck map was selected, which made me think, I'd like to find out what maps are and are not popular and weed out some of these stinkers that I thought looked nice but people don't like to play. I'll use the stats page as a guide to what are popular maps.

Also, AWS, huh? nice! I've played your server. 

I work for an internet company that does cloud and colo behind nine tier-1 backbone providers here in Atlanta.... I might just have to spin up a the Ug's Cave servers in our secret colo location for employees only. A an old bare-metal 12-core Xeon @ 3GHz with 64GB RAM might be a nice for hosting a few xonotic servers.  heh heh... and some.

Welcome! There may not be as many players as in triple-A games, but it's pretty painless to find games if you tune in at the right time. I like using this graph as a reference:

US servers have defintely been more populated as of late compared to a year or two ago. /v/ from 8chan hosts a Xonotic gamenight every weekend or something to that effect and has brought regulars. It's a good habit to join and wait for people to come as many just sit in the server queue waiting for others to join while never joining themselves.

I'm in Atlanta, and as I browse Xonotic servers, I see very few players on servers that offer low pings here in the USA. Why?  Lack of good pure (and 0.8.2) servers with great map collections? Lack of good USA servers? Americans moved on to better things?

So, I have gigabit fiber at home. I have way more computers on my home network than I need. So, I started up Ug's Cave [Atlanta]: two servers with a few good polished maps in addition to the stock maps: one pure server with gametype and maptype voting, and the other server with Instagib and Hook (still pure, I guess).

I run a vanilla 0.8.2 server with a curated map collection in the U.S with gametype voting. It simply is on the west side of the country (~100 ms for those on the east). There's a clone of it in Georgia as well, though it's managed by a separate admin.

For the US, I generally observe that most of the players are on the East Coast, and tend to group up on random servers (vanilla, instagib, overkill). This extends to European servers since they don't mind too much about 100 - 150 ms typically. This sometimes leaves me playing with the niche of west coast players I've gathered on my server (since its ~200 ms minimum to European servers).

US servers have defintely been more populated as of late compared to a year or two ago. /v/ from 8chan hosts a Xonotic gamenight every weekend or something to that effect and has brought regulars. It's a good habit to join and wait for people to come as many just sit in the server queue waiting for others to join while never joining themselves.

The Xonotic game night is roughly once every 10 months or a year depending on scheduling and attendance. The game nights you're talking about change the game played each time.