Battlefield Division bf2 on rPi? Are you mad?

[itsfulloftuna]

Yes. Yes I am.

A few of us at work were talking about the good ol' days of BF2. One of them discovered the battlelog.co site, which I hadn't heard of until tonight, and saw that there were active people playing. We were chatting up, reminiscing on old clans lost within the fogs of time and server administration days gone by, and then it hit me.

Not knowing immediately what the hardware requirements were to run a BF2 server, I looked it up. Gasp! 1 Ghz CPU and 256 MB of RAM for a smooth, 16-player server in *nix? I've throw away/donated stronger parts than this! And, then it hit me again. Out of the various Raspberry Pi's that I have, I have one (which is a Version 2 - quad core @ 1Ghz and 1 GB RAM) that is sitting and doing nothing, except relaying IPv6 for me. I ran Minecraft and Terraria serving on this, so let's try to run BF2 with a bit o' BF2CC for a management console. Should work, right?

 

[armypoilce]

yeah bf2 was good in the days with the seeding bots lol

 

[itsfulloftuna]

yeah bf2 was good in the days with the seeding bots lol

Oh yeah. Love me some BF2. First things first, BF2 doesn't seem to like my mouse in-game. it works through the menus and binding actions to it, but once I get where I can spawn, it freezes the mouse/keyboard.

If I get it working, and it works outside after testing, perhaps I'll leave it running in case anyone from eGO wants to hook up. The servers from my desktop from the battlelog.co seems to be in the 190-200 ms range.

 

[itsfulloftuna]

Well, so much for this project. The ARMvX derivative of the BF2 server files that I have (oddily enough that still include amd64 and ia32 files for some reason) are tossing up nothing but errors. Someone had the idea to do this, but they either half-finished the "port" or they got it working on devices other than compact computing, probably pre-NUC. You have to admit, it would have been a cool project; BF2 on a PC about the size of a cell phone.

I'm sure someone will pick this up and continue to work on it. I did hear whispers of a Quake 3 server that runs on Pi.....

 

[KelpTheGreat]

What the heck is a raspberry Pi?

 

[itsfulloftuna]

What the heck is a raspberry Pi?

https://www.raspberrypi.org/

It's a small, credit card sized computer that contains a processor, RAM, USB, HDMI and Ethernet port. The processor is generally an ARM processor, much like the ones in Android phones. Compared to modern PC's, they are generally weaker; running an 800 to 1Ghz single or quad core processor, 256 MB to 1 GB of RAM, running a ARM derivative of Linux (although Windows 10 is rumored to work on the newer versions of the Pi's). For storage, they will either use a SD or MicroSD card, anywhere from 4GB to 64GB, depending on the requirements of the user. They are designed this way to be extremely affordable; the newer models are only $35, older models start at $20, and have virtually no footprint of power consumption, taking as little as 400 mA.

Their general purpose is to automate processes. Some people turn them into DAC's, others use them for XBMC. I've read stories on people using them for weather stations or kitchen PC's.

I have 3 of them that I run completely headless, a rPi B+ (900Mhz single core, 512 MB ram), a rPi 2 (1Ghz quad core, 1 GB RAM), and a third party Hummingboard (1Ghz dual core, 1GB RAM, mSATA port) and they do various things from providing IPv6 relaying, personal cloud storage from my cell phone or PC at work, to a SMB sharing across my network.

It's also a first choice for someone that I encounter that wants to learn linux, but do not have the space or financial freedom to build another PC.

 

[ElectricCookie]

You might run into issues with the architecture. The raspberryPi is ARM based and as far as I know the b2 servers are x86 / x64. It would be interesting though...

 

[itsfulloftuna]

You might run into issues with the architecture. The raspberryPi is ARM based and as far as I know the b2 servers are x86 / x64. It would be interesting though...

I did find a somehwat hacked server that stated it could run on ARM processors, and, for some reason, that post is gone from this thread. But, yeah, I did run into problems about a week or so ago and decided to scrap the project. I actually did get the server to show up locally, however, there was a whole bunch of issues, specifically with a ln to punkbuster folder, even when I tried to skip it. Ah well, it was fun to tinker around with it.