I created this tracker while tsetsefly.de was offline for a week and wanted to initiate anarchies on my Piccu Engine servers (Piccu is a source port of the 1.5 patch). The focus is instantaneity of updates, as it pings servers for status every 5 seconds, and the index auto-refreshes every 30 seconds. Tsetsefly.de only updates every 5 minutes, where it can be awkward coordinating pickup games ("Which server did you join? I don't see you!").
This tracker is somewhat self-serving as it primarily suits the 4 VPS machines I maintain (2 owned by me, 2 owned by Descentmax7930), and the focus of the servers/tracker is Descent 3 Piccu Engine which is accruing its own regular playerbase. The increased packet rate is honestly a gamechanger. More info can be found in the about page https://tracker.h0m3.net/about.html
Also on the tracker is:
- A page for info on getting maps https://tracker.h0m3.net/maps.html which links to several repositories as well as a zip file of all the maps my Piccu servers run on anarchy/team anarchy.
- A page showing matches that happened recently https://tracker.h0m3.net/recent.html
So about "recent matches", the tracker can't actually tell when a game has ended. On the 4 VPSs in Colorado, Chicago, New York, UK, I'm running 2 servers each with powershell/python scripts that rotate maps and generate scoreboards at the end of every 20-minute round. Then the scripts send those images to the server tracker. This works for anarchies. For team anarchies and other game modes, it's hard to parse from the stats file which team a player was on, so those games don't get recorded. For amusement I hooked up an AI image generator to create a victory portrait for the winner, factoring their alias and the level into the prompt. The results range from epic to morbid to ridiculous, and I hope the novelty inspires people to play more.
Some future improvements could include dynamic refreshing with a local http server. Then the index will update very often on a per row basis. The tracker can't sort by category either and could use space more efficiently. Those are a few things I'd improve if more server hosts begin reporting their servers. If you run a D3 server and add tracker.h0m3.net to your trackers config, it should show up (keep in mind there is a max of 5 trackers that a D3 server can ping.) While it doesn't have to be a 1.5 server or a piccu server, most of the people that reference this tracker are Piccu Engine players.
If you can get Piccu Engine running (linux/osx versions are not out yet) players hope to see you in the mines soon!