America's Army: Special Forces is a game focusing on the United States Army. The dedicated server can be run as a Windows Service using FireDaemon Pro. This will allow you to have the dedicated server start automatically at boot prior to login, start multiple instances of America's Army: Special Forces, and more. This HOWTO explains how to set it up. You can also use FireDaemon Fusion to manage FireDaemon and other Windows services via a web browser.
America's Army: Special Forces Setup Under FireDaemon Pro
Download America's Army from here. The current version at time of writing was America's Army: Special Forces (Link-Up) v2.6.0. The download is big - nearly 900MB. This download contains the dedicated server component.
Install America's Army: Special Forces into the directory of your choice. Note that the default installation directory is C:\Program Files\America's Army. If you want to run the dedicated server under FireDaemon directly and NOT out of the supplied batch file (System\runserver.bat), you must change this directory name to something that excludes punctuation and spaces. The dedicated server fails to find its map files and launch as a service correctly when installed into a directory containing spaces and/or punctuation . We recommend you install into C:\AmericasArmy or a similarly named directory. Then apply any relevant patches.
Download and install FireDaemon Pro into the directory of your choice, typically C:\Program Files\FireDaemon.
Next start the FireDaemon GUI from the desktop shortcut. Click on the "Create a new service definition" button in the toolbar (or type Ctrl+N) and enter the information into the fields as you see below. Adjust the paths to suit your installation. Note the required parameters.
- Executable: The path to your Server.exe file. The path specified in this HOWTO is C:\AmericasArmy\system\Server.exe.
- Working Directory: The directory containing your Server.exe file. The path specified in this HOWTO is C:\AmericasArmy\system.
<servertype> <mapname> [log=<logfilename>] [ini=<inifilename>]servertype
Valid values are lan, global, lantournament or tournament.
mapname
Initial map to load. You must provide the .aao extension. All maps are found in the Maps folder.
log (optional)
Name of file to log to. If not specified ArmyOps.log is used.
ini (optional)
Name of server configuration file. If not specified ArmyOps.ini is used.
Your executable can optionally be C:\AmericasArmy\System\runserver.bat. This batch file contains the command line parameters listed above. It is not necessary to enter values into FireDaemon's Parameters field if you use this file. Using this file will also allow you to launch America's Army: Special Forces in directories containing spaces and punctuation, e.g. C:\Program Files\America's Army. Edit runserver.bat to change the dedicated server's startup parameters.
If you want / do not want to observe your dedicated server running, click on the FireDaemon Settings tab, and check/uncheck Interact with Desktop. America's Army: Special Forces uses a fair chunk of RAM (145MB+) and CPU. This may cause issues and slow the boot time of your server. If you want to delay the startup of the server and change its priority then click on the Settings tab. Optionally change the Pre-Launch delay to 5000ms and the Priority to High. Changing the priority to Real Time is not recommended.
Click OK to finish setup and start America's Army: Special Forces Dedicated Server!
Additional America's Army Configuration
You may have to change the configuration (server.ini and/or ArmyOps.ini to your server's IPs) in order to support network games. Edit these files and change the following sections:
[IpDrv.GameSpyQR] bNAT=True IP=your box's ip here [IpDrv.SCIQR] ;(delete the ';' in front of 'IP=127.0.0.1' when setting your IP) IP=your box's ip here