prboom-plus-game-server(6)

💖 prboom-plus-game-server 💖

okay bestie, gather round — this is the manual page for prboom-plus-game-server(6), living in the Games Manual section, and it's literally the thing that makes Doom netgames happen. no cap. 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

prboom-plus-game-server — the server for network games of PrBoom+. it's giving hostess with the mostest. 👑

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

prboom-plus-game-server [ -adfnrv ] [ -e epis ] [ -l level ] [ -t ticdup
] [ -x xtics ] [ -p port ] [ -s skill ] [ -N players ] [ -c conffilename
] [ -w wadname[,dl_url ]]

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so. PrBoom is a version of the first-person shooter game Doom, which iD software originally released back in 1993. yes, before you were born, i know. 🦋

PrBoom+ is a Doom source port that grew out of the original PrBoom project, and among other things it can do the very iconic trick of letting several players play together over a TCP/IP network. 🌈

to start a network game (everyone calls it a netgame, iykyk), the server goes first. prboom-plus-game-server takes a bunch of parameters that control what kind of game it is — the skill level, how many players, which level to play, optional WAD file(s) to load, all of that. 💅

then every player who wants in runs prboom-plus -net hostname, where hostname is the name of the machine the server is running on. each copy of PrBoom+ grabs the game info from the server, and once the specified number of players have joined, the game begins. main character energy for everyone involved, honestly. 🔥

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -N players — sets the number of players in the game (default 2). the server sits there and waits for exactly this many players to join before it starts the game. so don't invite extra people, bestie, the math is the math. 😭
• -e epis — the episode to play (default 1). unless you're playing Doom 1 or The Ultimate Doom and you specifically want one of the later episodes, you genuinely do not need to touch this. leave it alone. it's fine. 🧚
• -l level — the level to play (default 1).
• -s skill — pick the skill level to play (1-5).
• -d — sets the game mode to (old) deathmatch (default is cooperative). this is the original deathmatch mode, where ammunition and power-ups do not respawn, and weapons stay on the map but each player can only pick one up once per player life — exactly like in cooperative games. retro behaviour, honestly kind of iconic. 💀
• -a — sets the game mode to altdeath (the documentation calls it deathmatch v2.0) (default is cooperative). here, most items picked up by players respawn after a while once they've been grabbed. this applies to weapons too, which — unlike in normal deathmatch mode — also vanish for a bit when someone picks them up. 🍓
• -f — select fast mode, i.e. the monsters move faster. good luck babe. 🏃
• -n — selects nomonsters mode, so there are literally no monsters in the game at all. peaceful. serene. still Doom though.
• -r — respawn mode. if you don't know what this is, you don't want it ;-). that's a direct quote from the vibes, i'm just the messenger. 🙈
• -c conffilename — specifies a configuration file to read, which sets parameters for the game. it's in the same format as the PrBoom+ configuration file (fr fr, you can even ask it to read your normal PrBoom+ config if you want to). only certain settings get acknowledged though: default_skill, default_compatibility_level, the compatibility options, and some of the game settings. pro tip: use -v and the server will print the options as it recognises them. 👀
• -w wadname[,dl_url] — specifies a WAD file to play, and adds it to the internal list the server keeps. when a client connects, the server sends that list of WADs over, and PrBoom+ then adds it to the list of WADs specified on its own command line. optionally you can also hand over an url to the file — if PrBoom+ can't find the named WAD when it connects, it'll try to retrieve the file from that url, and extract it if that's needed. self-healing, we love to see it. ✨
• -t ticdup — Reserved. that's it. that's the whole option. reserved. 💜
• -x xtics — this makes extra information get sent with every network packet. it helps on networks with high packet loss, but heads up, it uses more bandwidth. trade-offs, bestie. ⚖️
• -p port — tells prboom-plus-server which port number to communicate over (default 5030). careful though: if you change this away from the default, then all the clients also need to specify this number when they try to connect — the default programmed into PrBoom+ is 5030 as well, so everyone has to match. 💅
• -v — bumps the verbosity level, printing more diagnostics. the more times you pass -v, the more it yaps. 🗣️

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• prboom-plus(6)
• prboom-plus.cfg(5)

for more info, check the README that came with PrBoom+. 📖

Doom is a registered trademark of id software (http://www.idsoftware.com/). not mine, not yours, theirs. 🫶

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✨ AUTHORS ✨

see the file AUTHORS included with the PrBoom+ distribution. this man page was written by Colin Phipps (cph@moria.org.uk). thank you Colin, absolute legend, ate. 👑

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🌸 this one's from the Games Manual, dated 2011-06-27, and it's prboom-plus-game-server(6) — go start a netgame, you've got this. mwah. 💖✨🎀