Features:

  1. Support the protocol that the official masterservers use. This includes the talking between: No problem so far. This might include a little package sniffing. The 'xlife' project at sourceforge stopped its development, but a look at their code (GPL) could ease things a lot.
  2. Antbear should work as a normal masterserver so it can be used in LANs for example.
  3. As opposed to the above point(2) antbear on the 'wild' internet shall update its serverlist by downloading it from the official masterservers every once in a while. That makes antbear some sort of a mirror. A client (gamebrowser) would not recognize the difference to the official servers. The difference is that no gameserver would register itself at antbear. All antbear has to do now is updating the saved status information of the servers on its own. Antbear has to query all servers over and over (see realisation).
  4. Antbear should work without the need to save any data (no influence on swap, though ;) to disk. Antbear will work with default settings , modified by commandline parameters or optionally by a configuration file.
  5. Also antbear will be highly customizable in order to make it run with minimized traffic and CPU/memory requirements. This greatly increases antbears 'habitat' .
  6. Antbear will be able to run independent from any other antbear as a single masterserver.
  7. Antbear will be usable together with other antbears as a distributed server. That way a bunch of SUPPORTER antbears could provide some other MASTER antbear with updated server information. The MASTER could concentrate on client request processing which would increase its performance and decrease its requirements.

Relisation:

  1. Details on this topic can be found here.