What are Orbital Servers?!?
Orbitals are dedicated servers, donated by Orbital Sponsors, around the world running Team XLink's Advanced Orbital Server software. The Orbitals serve to authenticate users and relay chat/arena information between connected clients. No actual game traffic passes through the Orbitals.
When you connect to XLink Kai, you are attached to the orbital server that first respond to you. This is generally the Orbital geographically closest to you and having available capacity. Whenever someone logs in to Kai, changes Arenas, creates private arenas, or sends a chat message, the Orbital server that user is connected to relays these details to all the other Orbital servers. The Orbs are constantly chatting with one another, ensuring each knows what is happening on the other.
The collection of connected Orbitals is called the Orbital Mesh. Our challenge is to ensure there are enough geographically separated Orbitals to accommodate all our players while not deploying so many orbitals that the inner-orbital traffic exceeds orbital to client traffic. Too few Orbitals causes Mesh degradation. Too many Orbitals also causes the Mesh to become degraded because each Orb struggles to relay its local information to each other Orbital. It's a delicate balance.
How can I offer to act as an orbital server?
Although we appreciate the offers, we simply cannot accept Orbitals servers where the following criteria are not met:
- Linux (CentOS preferable) dedicated server available 24/7 with at least 1 Mbps upload/download
- Orbital will use 60GB of bandwidth per month minimum
- Ports 34525 UDP, 34525-34527 TCP must be available
- If possible, remote access for Team XLink Administration to restart the Orbital as needed would be preferred
- Note: under Linux, the Orbital software should run as a regular user. Root access is only needed if the above-mentioned ports need to be enabled on the server's firewall
- An Orbital server cannot run on the same local network as the Kai Client and Engine
If you have a dedicated server and available bandwidth to share, please email us and let us know. All applications are appreciated…
