They released an update for F-22 Raptor late December 2015, and apparently the trade mark on some of the names was also extended on some titles in the last 12 months...
So there you have it, im not suggesting nova is closing or has closed up shop, but considering its been a year since they made any public announcement its anyone's guess whats actually going on, that combined with the fact novaworld was rumoured to be hosted in some guys garage for the last few years... it might be after all.
All i know is the update servers still appear online, so its just the main novaworld login server(s) that are currently dead.
If i find out more i will post back here, does anyone else know some more news?
Alternatively hard maps could consider hosting their own VPN server, it would be a simple thing to throw together an openvpn server config that was used for jo traffic only (no default gateway)...
I suggest if it really is the end we make a decision what to use...
Update: Scratch that its back.... hopefully its back for a while, i will leave this post here as if it suddenly vanishes again, it maybe useful to others to know about tunngle :)
Joined: Fri Dec 19 2003 Location: Scotland Posts: 4651
Novalogic wont go on forever but until it does close down for good, and who knows when, we will just host away as normal or until our servers or us break down!
We will look into alternative ways of hosting but to be honest I cant see too many players using an alternative (would be nice to be wrong) and there is not much point in us using resources which cost money when only a few would play, I know that sounds harsh and like I say it would be nice to prove that theory wrong but having done this for a long time now we kind of get to know what will probably happen.
Lets just hope Nova keep the servers up or hand them over to someone else that would for the die hards among us!
The cheapest (completely free) way is rocking your/are own (assuming the existing hosts have sufficient ram) is to possibly have a linux vm running and to rock an openvpn server (which would not really be creating more traffic/load for the hosts than they already have) and wont cost anything for additional hardware, as virtualbox and linux are both free (assuming the host machines support Physical Address Extension (PAE) at cpu level.
This would essentially create a subnet for the users to connect into (communicate using) which would have no default gateway (no internet access) and no access to the hosts own local area network.
Alternatively a good quality dd-wrt or wrt router with openvpn support would also work, additionally a rasberry pii would also work.
Assuming all the hardmap servers were hosted on the same lan one vpn would rock the lot.. if not it would be a case of picking which vpn server you wanted (to connect onto where ever the server was hosted).
This is essentially the way things like tunngle work, connecting you into a lan subnet (without giving you a default gateway), however unlike tunngle where the game servers are other clients on the network, you would instead use iptables on the linux host to allow the jo server on the firewalled subnet below to pass the relevant ports across from the jo server/host.
Or (just like tunngle) one person would host the vpn solution (or it could be done by a rented vps, but this would cost) and then the other servers would just connect in as clients, although this would introduce additional latency and all hardmaps servers would be relayed through one host, so it would need a reasonable low latency bandwidth)... but it essentially a mirror of the way tunngle works.
It could be setup so everyone just logged in with the same user name to save on administrating a user for each user, or if you prefer someone would need to create a user for everyone... this would then give you the ability to kick bad users for good, but someones going to need to administrate the users.
Tunngles ok, but its advert galore and pay for past a certain stage, so going forward everyone (hardmaps admins) need to either agree on what system to use, or consider as i say rocking their own.
So if one of the admin/server operators wants to at least test going down this route, i would be more than happy to lend a hand setting up a test.
It really sux they never wrote in a command line for Joint Ops so you could just pass it a sever ip... it would make things so much easier.