@neteffectcafe:
Yes i am canning Rogers as its throttled all to hell with pings hovering at 400 if ANYONE hits P2P, including game updates that use p2p. And at about 4 or 5 it slows down when all the local kids come home. i am surrounded by buildings which are probably over sold.
The bell line is fine unless the up load breaks 500k, then it also goes haywire and hits 400 to 500 ping and throttles. I am hoping for 16/16 FTTN which they swear is unthrottled and has no caps. We will see. if worse comes to worse i will get someone who knows far more than I to come in and implement MLPPP when i am forced to switch to Teksavvy.
You are going to need some systems side work to help reduce the load.
Most free to play (account based) games do not actually need to be updated the normal way. You can usually bypass the updating process by updating only one client and replicating the game directory on the other computers.
Certain games may store the versioning information in the registry key, export this together with the copy process and manually import the key on the other computers if need be.
Some tools that can make your life better are Nircmd, Autoit (simple but powerful scripting language), batch files, Robocopy & Task scheduler.
What I used to do was to implement a schedule to load a custom written program (in Autoit) on startup. The program tests for the existence of certain flag files (an empty txt file with specific name in certain directories). Upon encountering the files, it will take certain actions. eg. Import a reg file in a certain directory.
Since AutoIT can be compiled into an exe without any UI, the process cannot be closed normally by the customers like a batch/ cmd file.
This basically allows me to copy & paste the updated game folder & reg file onto the other computers and insert a txt file marker at the same time. Rebooting the computer will then import the reg key automatically and there won't be a need to update the client, thus, reducing the internet bandwidth usage.
If your computer naming convention is done properly, you can use a batch script to automate the copy process.
This is an example script I used in the early parts (subsequently changed it to allow parameters to be parsed and added more variables to allow the script to become a universal template):
I had my computers with names in sequential order. eg. PC01, PC02…..PC34, PC35
If you want to reuse this, you will need a similar way of connecting to the computer by name or IP (change the share path variable into IP address octets instead)
@ECHO OFF
SET STARTRG=1
SET ENDRG=30
SET SRCDIR="c:\program files\game dir"
SET DSTDIR=\game dir
SET LOGDIR=C:\TEMP\
SET LOGFILE=GAME_Log.Log
SET LOGPATH=%%LOGDIR%%LOGFILE
SET OPTS=/MIR /COPY:DAT /DCOPY:T /NFL /NDL /NP /R:3 /W:10
IF NOT EXIST %%LOGDIR MKDIR %%LOGDIR
for /L %%x in (%%STARTRG,1,%%ENDRG) DO (
if %%x LSS 10 (
ECHO Copying to PC0%%x...
if %%x equ %%STARTRG (
robocopy /LOG:%%LOGPATH %%OPTS %%SRCDIR "\\pc0%%x%%DSTDIR"
) else (
robocopy /LOG+:%%LOGPATH %%OPTS %%SRCDIR "\\pc0%%x%%DSTDIR"
)
) else (
ECHO Copying to PC%%x...
robocopy /LOG+:%%LOGPATH %%OPTS %%SRCDIR "\\pc%%x%%DSTDIR"
)
)
pause
