| Quick-Start Guide |
| Welcome to the Qtracker quick-start guide. The goal of this guide is to get you fragging as quickly as possible, while explaining the basic operation of Qtracker. |
| Introduction to Qtracker
| If you haven't already, launch Qtracker now.
| Qtracker is a game and music server browser for the Internet and your LAN. It can also generate HTML and PHP server listings, allow you to Remotely Administer your game server, it can tell you where your friends are playing, supports server-side filtering, and even region filtering. Additionally, Qtracker can display player names using the in-game font for a variety of games, allowing you to see fun names, and Qtracker can show you a thumbnail image of the map being played. Qtracker is designed more for experienced gamers and admins who know where they want to play, are in a clan, or frequent LAN parties. But don't worry, if you're a novice, you won't have any problem using Qtracker. Qtracker is COMPLETELY FREE. There's no advertisements, spy ware, or any of that crap. And it's written by one person who doesn't have a lot of free time to work on it. Even though it's free, make a contribution by registering so I won't decide to stop being such a nice guy. Suggestions, comments and the like are always welcome, so visit the Qtracker Forums and all of your needs and wildest desires can finally be fulfilled. It's important to note that a lot of games do not have public server listings. What does this mean to you? It means that I have an extremely hard time providing you with a listing of servers. So keep this in mind when you complain that I'm missing a few hundred America's Army servers. Be thankful you have any. Now, you do have the power to help me. You can either rag on the game developer in question and tell them to use the Qtracker SDK. Or you can take matters into your own hands and use QtUplink. QtUplink is a Windows application that's installed with Qtracker and when ran on the same machine as your game server it will query your game server and register it with the Qtracker Masters so other Qtracker users will see the server. Now that you kind of know what's going on, let's talk about the interface. You'll notice in the screen shot that there are two primary sections. Section 1 is your view listing, organized as a tree view. What's a view you ask? A view is a filtered listing of servers that only appear when the view is selected. The servers will be visible in Section 2. So if you only wanted to see Battlefield Vietnam servers just click on the root Battlefield Vietnam view and Section 2 will change to only show those servers. This concept applies to all the views you see in Section 1. If you wanted to only see Internet game servers for Call of Duty that were running Heat of Battle just click on that and that's all you'll see. An important thing to note about views such as All Servers and root game views like Battlefield Vietnam is that they only show active servers that are stored in the user folders you've created. If you want to see Internet games that don't exist in a folder you've created, then you will have to click on the Internet Games view or any of the views below it (Game Types or Mods). The reasoning behind this is that it's assumed that you will be using Find Internet Games infrequently since the average gamer isn't always playing on new servers. You move around until you find a group of servers you like and you stick with them. These are the servers you would put into a folder, and they're really the only ones you care about when using the program. If you decide to look for new servers, they're contained in their own views and you can drag servers into your folders so your folder servers aren't obscured by thousands of other servers. Okay, that should cover it; you can figure out the rest on your own. The Initial Program Setup Wizard should have popped up by now, so let's get started...
| Initial Program Setup
| This wizard is designed to help you configure the most commonly changed settings. You're currently viewing the introduction page that will start you along the process. Click Next to begin.
| Step 1: Select the games you'd like to use Qtracker to play. At startup, Qtracker will automatically detect what games you have installed and display than in bold. This is done by looking at the registry, so it's possible that some games may not be picked up if you didn't properly install them, have moved them, or whatever. Games that are checked will be the ONLY games that Qtracker lets you play. All of the other games will be hidden, and if game servers are found on your LAN that aren't checked, they will be ignored. Never fear though; if you make a mistake or change your mind, you can always re-select your games later from the View menu. You will also be able to change such things as the application start-in folder and command-line. Should you wish to change the application used to play a game, click on the game in question and click the Browse button next to the "Application used to play this game:" edit box. Are you a Half-Life player? If so, you have to choose if you'd like to use Steam or not. To get this option, click on Half-Life and the Steam checkbox will become active. Steam uses an entirely different executable from original Half-Life, so when you toggle the checkbox you'll notice that the application will change. When Steam is enabled, Qtracker will only retrieve Steam servers when retrieving server listings. And when Steam is disabled, Qtracker will only retrieve non-Steam server listings. Turning on Steam doesn't mean that you won't be able to play on non-Steam servers. Qtracker automatically detects if a server uses Steam and will use the appropriate application to connect you to a game server. So when you're at a LAN party you'll automatically use the correct program. Click Next when you've completed selecting the games you play.
| Step 2: Configure your network connection. Changing the Internet Connection Speed can greatly effect Qtracker's querying performance. Try to pick a value that's just slightly under your actual connection speed. If you have different upstream and downstream speeds, go with your downstream speed. If you pick a value that's too high, you may see a lot of servers that show as non-responding (gray). Additionally your Internet connection may be flooded with traffic and you may appear to lose connectivity to the Internet. Decreasing either "Amount of time to wait for a response" or "Number of retry attempts after timing out" will make querying faster. However, setting either of these too low will result in a lot of non-responding (gray) servers. Please keep in mind that the Qtracker Masters are constantly querying game servers to determine if they're active or not. The server listings you retrieve using Qtracker have been filtered to only provide you with active servers, so you shouldn't get a lot of non-resonding servers. If you do, then something's configured wrong. Click Next when you've completed configuring your connection.
| Step 3: Configure your regions. When retrieving server listings, Qtracker will ignore regions you don't want to see, which saves time downloading the server listing and also speeds up querying since there will be less servers to query. Click on a region to toggle its status. If a region is grayed with a red X, then that regions servers will not be downloaded when retrieving a server listing. Not all servers can be region identified due to a variety of reasons. Checking "Retrieve servers that cannot be region identified" will permit these servers to be downloaded when retrieving a server listing. It's recommended that you leave this checked. Click Next when you've completed configuring your regions.
| You're done! Click Finish to save your settings and get started. If you need to access this wizard again, you'll find it in the Help menu.
| Find Internet Games
| So it's time to find someplace to play. Qtracker calls the process of retrieving game server listings "Find Internet Games" since that's what you're doing. This option is available in several places, but for this tutorial I'll focus on the right-click (context) menu for folders, games, modifications, and game types. If you expand a game you'll notice an Internet Games view available under every game. For some games, Internet Games can be expanded so that a Game types branch and/or a Mods branch are visible. Right-click on a game, game type, or modification to bring up the context menu which will permit you to choose Find Internet Games. What servers are retrieved depends on what you right-clicked on. For example, if you wanted to download a server listing of only Natural Selection Half-Life servers, you would right-click on Natural Selection and then select Find Internet Games. Or if you only wanted to download a server listing of Capture the Flag servers, you'd right click on that. I think you get the idea. If you just want everything, right-click on the game itself or Internet Games and select Find Internet Games. No matter what you clicked on, what happens next is always the same: Qtracker connects to the Qtracker Masters and requests a filtered server listing for you. The server listing is then downloaded to your client: Next, the servers are loaded into memory (this step will be removed in a future release): Then the servers are queried: And finally, the servers are pinged: Congratulations! You've got servers.
| Servers: What To Do With Them?
| Now that you've got servers, just what can you do with them? Well, for starters, if you want to see who's playing on a server, scores, rules, etc, just double-click on the server or right-click on it and select View Players, Scores, and Rules... See that cool picture of the map being played? That's called a Mapshot Pack, which is exclusive to Qtracker. You'll need to download these yourself as there's too many to include in the Qtracker installation. So this server looks promising and you want to go kick some lamer butt, right? Click on this icon to connect. You'll find this icon available in several places: menus, toolbars, server details, etc. If the server requires a password, you will be prompted to enter it in prior to connecting: If the server is full, the server can automatically be monitored until a slot opens up: Okay, so maybe you didn't want to connect to this server. Maybe you'd like to add it to a folder so you can play on it later...
| Servers: Adding To A Folder
| So you've got a bunch of servers burning a hole in your pocket. Maybe they're your clan's servers, or just an HPB server you like to frequent for easy kills. Whatever the case, you want to add servers to a folder. Or do you? Just what exactly does a folder do? Folders allow you to organize your servers and retain them so when you exit the program and re-run it, they'll still be there. More than that though, the contents of your folders can be auto-refreshed every few seconds to keep the server information up-to-date. They're perfect for storing your favorite game servers, clan servers, or whatever, so when you launch Qtracker the servers are automatically queried for you. Creating a folder is easy, just right-click on the game you'd like to create a folder for and click New then Folder. A folder called "New Folder" will appear as well as an edit box so you can type in the name you'd like for the folder and press enter. Now that you've got a folder, how do you add servers to it? The easiest way is to left-drag the servers with your mouse into the folder. But you can also manually add the server, if you know it's ip address and query port. To manually add a server, right-click on the folder you want to add the server to and choose New then Server. The Add Server dialog will appear prompting you for the server information. Once you've entered in the ip address and query port, click Add and the server will be added to your folder and automatically queried. If the server shows with the name "New Server" and is grayed out, then either the server isn't up or you didn't enter in the correct ip address or query port. To change the ip address or query port of the server you just added, you can right-click on the server and choose Properties.... Okay, I'm going to cut this short since you really have enough to get started. BrainPr0n was kind enough to put together his own users guide to Qtracker which you will find useful as well. Enjoy the program.