0003894: Allow servers to present their country to launchers

MantisBT - Zandronum

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Date Submitted

Last Update

0003894

Zandronum

[All Projects] Suggestion

public

2021-08-05 15:08

2021-12-12 23:05

Reporter

DrinkyBird

Assigned To

DrinkyBird

Priority

normal

Severity

minor

Reproducibility

N/A

Status

resolved

Resolution

fixed

Platform

OS Version

Product Version

3.1-beta

Target Version

3.1

Fixed in Version

3.1

Summary

0003894: Allow servers to present their country to launchers

Description

Many launchers display a country flag next to servers in their server list. Currently, they use IP geolocation to determine which country the server in - but this method is often inaccurate: for example, some geolocation services detect Blue Firestick's current host as being in France, despite being in the UK. Indeed, our previous host used to be detected by Doom Explorer as being in the US - an entire ocean's distance!

I propose that Zandronum allow server hosts to set their server's country themselves, so that hosts can ensure their servers appear as in the correct location.

This would involve adding a new sv_country server CVAR. I suggest this CVAR accept ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country codes - as Doomseeker and doomlist.net already use this format for their flags. In addition, the CVAR could accept two special values, "unknown", which tells the launcher to display a generic unknown flag, and "automatic", to tell the launcher it should attempt IP geolocation. "automatic" should be the default value for this CVAR.

This would also require the addition of a new field to the launcher protocol, which can simply contain three characters:
* If the value of sv_country is three characters long, send the uppercase value of the CVAR. If the value is not a valid country code, or the launcher is missing the flag for that given country, it should display the unknown flag (as a result Zandronum won't need to verify that the value of sv_country is a valid country code)
* If the value of sv_country is "automatic" (case insensitive) then this field's value should be XIP, and the launcher should attempt geolocation. If geolocation is unimplementated, disabled, or fails, it shoud display the unknown flag
* Otherwise, send XUN, and display the unknown flag
The ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 reserves any country codes within the range XAA-XZZ so we can safely use these for special values.

Steps To Reproduce

Additional Information

GoldSrc and Source engine games have been doing something similar forever, with Garry's Mod doing exactly as I propose here.

I can't see this causing issues for players, even if a host lied about their server's location, the latency when in-game might reveal that. Launchers could possibly offer the option to always use geolocation if a player distrust hosts enough.