Hi,

Is there a reason why nowdays there is a limit on spectators on the servers? This seems to be 4 at now.
One of it is the server bot daemon, or who should I call that bot, so there are 3 spots left.

I am an oldschool guy who prefers specting instead of qtv, and this quite annoys me.

Is this just because the default server.cfg that comes with the latest ktx contains max_spectators 4, or something like that, or there is/was something that made this default on servers? If I remember correctly 2-3 years ago this was not the case, but I might be mistaken...


Regards,
tamas

I think It's a combination of the things you mentioned. As QTV became standard on most servers and included in server packages, that's simply the standard way to have it. It requires less bandwidth for the server though and enables heaps of more features for the spectators though so most people have got used to it. In what way is it not an improvement compared to the old fashion way of spectating?

Back in the day I wrote a comparison between Qizmo spectating (comparable to normal spectating) vs QTV and it can be found from QTV wiki page

http://qw-dev.net/projects/qtv/wiki (bandwidth requirements and comparison between qizmo and qtv)

Ake already mentioned some of the reasons why we (ktx+mvdsv+qtv dev-team) chose to limit default spec slots when we were still developing serverside stuff. Among other things It also saves CPU time and some memory so you don't have to have the best possible hardware to run QW-servers. (pentium 4 pieces of shit should be enough with 512MB ram)

Also note that all the official games can be spectated via QTV these days (nospecs is used so noone can ghost).


QTV 1.00 "initial release" was on 25.02.2009 and the development started back in the summer 2007 so QTV was highly promoted already before the initial release, so you could actually say this was not the case like 5 years ago, but you would still remember it incorrectly. I started running servers back in 2006 and joined the serverside projects at the same time (actually early 2007) and even at that time maxspecs was mostly set o 4, excluding some russian servers and maybe XS4ALL.