About

333networks is a non-profit volunteer group, organised by Darkelarious, that developed and improves open-source masterserver software for legacy games. We focus on multiplayer support for legacy games, documenting our efforts and providing this via our website.

Origin

In 2004 333networks started as a spin-off activity from members of the ~333~clan and the source-clan to host gameservers for UTDemo (v348)^[1]. Darkelarious made a website to display our own servers and later for all available UTDemo servers. In the process we learned to retrieve this information directly from the gameservers.

Our focus shifted from simple game mods to learning about server statistics and automating the process of acquiring a list of available servers for our website. After learning to communicate with existing masterserver applets, we managed to retrieve the entire UTDemo serverlist (a whole 17 servers at the time) and retrieved data from the servers one by one.

Early 333networks efforts (2007).

Masterserver

In the autumn of 2008 the GameSpy masterserver services went down, and left thousands of players unable to play multiplayer games like Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Rune, Postal 2 and Deus Ex^{[2, 3]}. With the UCC masterserver applet provided with Unreal Tournament, we managed to start a small-scale masterserver.

UCC MasterServer applet in action.

As part of improving the synergy between the masterserver applet and 333networks website, we started experimenting with our own implementation of the masterserver following observed behaviour. We stored beacons from gameservers uplinking to us in a database and were able to present the serverlist through TCP connections, as well as presenting them directly on the website. In the years that followed we refined the process to a single software package that accomplished its tasks as our very own Unreal Tournament (demo) masterserver, written in Perl^[4], which was capable of supporting both UTDemo and full version, as well as the original Unreal title.

When in 2013 GameSpy Industries announced the shutdown of their servers^{[5, 6]}, multiplayer support for almost 2000 games disappeared. Some publishers reverted to their in-house solutions, but many publishers did not have the resources for this^{[7, 8, 9]}.

As Unreal Tournament and Unreal made use of the GameSpy protocol, our masterserver was capable of supporting many other games that made use of the same protocol. Rapidly, our list of supported games expanded with Rune, Deus Ex, Postal 2, Serious Sam and many more^[10]. Our focus shifted from merely displaying the statistics to providing and organising a wide spectrum masterserver with many supported games.

Future

333networks started out as a hobby and has grown tremendously in terms of knowledge, people involved and users. We learned a lot about network protocols, programming and web development, but also about professional communication with people and publishers. We obtained a number of skills in the process that helped us in our professional careers.

There are several games for which we hope to add functionality. And although we have come a long way with the website, serverlist and documentation, there are still a lot of improvements to be made. Not always are these improvements visible, not always are improvements made fast, but we enjoy to put our efforts in 333networks and will continue to do so for as long as we can.