WHY I LOVE
WHAT MAKES GAMES SPECIAL
Server control panel AMP put my favourite old shooters back into play. By Wes Fenlon
By god, do I love Unreal Tournament 2004. They don’t make them like this any more. But it’s not just the name. It’s the attitude, like a low bitrate voice saying “holy shit” when you max out the graphics settings. It’s the way I can die, respawn and instagib a bot in the space of a single breath.
Months ago I found myself pining for UT2004’s manic pace and the occasional afternoon instagib sessions we’d have at the office when I first joined PC Gamer. But after a couple afternoons poking around dead message boards trying to find the right files and instructions to run a dedicated server, I gave up. The information was just too fractured, and my Linux command line skills were too poor. Even if I’d gotten a server running, I wouldn’t have been able to configure it to my liking.
SERVES ME RIGHT
Over the Christmas break at the end of 2023 I decided to give it another shot, and that’s when I discovered AMP, aka the Application Management Panel (is there some law that declares the more useful a piece of community-driven software is, the drier its name has to be?). AMP is that good shit. It’s a web panel that provides an easy-to-use mouse interface for running servers for dozens of games, from old shooters to Minecraft to recent hits like Sons of the Forest. Installing the server module for any game just takes a click, and all of the settings for that server live in a compact configuration menu. You can backup configs, update the software with a couple clicks, edit ports and check logs all without using a command line.
AMP has the vibe of an opensource platform, but it’s actually paid software. I happily slapped down my $5, reckoning that the developers charging for AMP would likely mean it had a friendlier install process than a lot of open-source software, and would be actively supported for the foreseeable future.
THE INFORMATION WAS JUST TOO FRACTURED, AND MY LINUX SKILLS WERE TOO POOR
With my first stab at Unreal, I’d struggled to figure out what to type into an .ini fil
