THIS DOCUMENT HAS NOT BEEN UPDATED FOR 1.6 ALPHA. RELEASE NOTES CAN BE FOUND IN THE FILE CHANGES.TXT.
Qstat displays information about Internet Quake servers. The servers are either down, non-responsive, or running a game. For servers running a game, the server name, map name, current number of players, and response time are displayed. Server rules and player information may also be displayed.
The host may be specified as an IP address or a hostname.
One line will be displayed for each argument. The first component of the line will be an argument given on the command-line. This can be used as a key to match input arguments to server status. Server rules and player information are displayed under the server info, indented by one tab stop
The response time is a measure of the expected playability of the server. The first number is the server's average time in milli-seconds to respond to a request packet from qstat. The second number is the total number of retries required to fetch the displayed information. More retries will cause the average response time to be higher. The response time will be more accurate if more requests are made to the server. A request is made for each server rule and line of player information. So setting the -P and -R options will result in a more accurate response time.
Quake supports a number of control codes for special effects in player names. Qstat normalizes the codes into the ASCII character set before display. The graphic codes are not translated except the orange brackets (hex 90, 10, 91, and 11) which are converted to '[' and ']'. Use the hex-player-names option -hpn to see the complete player name.
The Quake server does not return version information. But some small amount of info can be gathered from the server rules. The noexit rule did not appear until version 1.01.
Qstat sends packets to each host and waits for return packets. After some interval, another packet is sent to each host which has not yet responded. This is done several times before the host is considered non-responsive. Qstat can wait for responses from up to 20 hosts at a time. For host lists longer than that, qstat checks more hosts as results are determined.
If qstat exceeds the maximum number of retries when fetching server information, it will give up and try to move on to the next information. This means that some rules or player info may occasionally not appear. Player info may also be missing if a player drops out between getting the general server info and requesting the player info. If qstat times out on one rule request, no further rules can be fetched. This is a side-effect of the Quake protocol design.
The number of available file descriptors limits the number of simultaneous responses that can be checked. Qstat reuses file descriptors so it can never run out. The macro MAXFD in qstat.c determines how many file descriptors will be simultaneously opened. Raise or lower this value as needed. The default is 20 file descriptors.
Operating systems which translate ICMP Bad Port (ICMP_PORT_UNREACHABLE) into a ECONNREFUSED will display some hosts as DOWN. These hosts are up and connected to the network, but there is no program on the port. Solaris 2.5 and Irix 5.3 correctly support ICMP_PORT_UNREACHABLE, but Solaris 2.4 does not. See page 442 of "Unix Network Programming" by Richard Stevens for a description of this ICMP behavior.
Operating systems without correct ICMP behavior will just report hosts without Quake servers as non-responsive. Windows NT and Windows 95 don't seem to support this ICMP.
For hosts with multiple IP addresses, qstat will only send packets to the first address returned from the name service.
Qstat will report bogus reponse times if a server is listed
multiple times in a file or on the command line. Generally,
the later requests to the same server will take much longer.
Be sure to cull duplicate addresses from your server list.
On Unix, this can be done with sort | uniq.
Qstat has been compiled and tested on Solaris 2.4 and 2.5, Irix 5.3, Windows NT 3.51 & 4.0, Windows 95, FreeBSD 2.2, and BSDi. Sorry, no Linux testing on this version, though it will probably just work.
The Windows version of qstat (win32/qstat.exe) runs on Windows 95 and Windows NT as a console application. On Windows 95 and NT 4.0, short-cuts can be used to set the arguments to qstat. On Windows NT create a batch file similar to the supplied qstat.bat.
The OS/2 version of qstat (os2/qstat.exe) runs on OS/2 Warp. It was compiled by Per Hammer, per@mindbend.demon.co.uk. Per keeps an updated version of the OS/2 binary on his web page: http://www.mindbend.demon.co.uk/quake
This is qstat version 1.5. It works with qtest1 and
Quake shareware versions 0.9x and 1.0.x from id Software.
The qstat webpage is updated for each new version and
contains links to Quake server listings and pages about
the Quake network protocol. The page can be found at
http://www.activesw.com/people/steve/qstat.html
Steve Jankowski
steve@activesw.com
Copyright 1996 by Steve Jankowski
Permission granted to use this software for any purpose you
desire provided that existing copywrite notices are retained
verbatim in all copies and you derive no monetary benefit from
use of the source code or resulting program, files, or executable
programs except as noted.
Specific rights reserved:
o Resale of the programs, source code, files, or program
resulting from compiling the source code is reserved without
written permission of the author, Steve Jankowski.
o Inclusion of the programs, source code or program resulting
from compiling the source code within another program or
system for resale is reserved without the written permission
of the author, Steve Jankowski.
o Inclusion of the programs, source code or programs resulting
from compiling the source code within a "compilation" software
product is reserved without the written permission of the
author, Steve Jankowski.
o Redistribution of a modified version of the archive or its
files is reserved without the written permission of the author,
Steve Jankowski.
Specific rights granted:
o Permission is granted to use the programs and source code to
generate information from which the user derives monetary
benefit.