I feel that many has not yet received this piece of good news, and that the established game sites and other game media is reluctant to write about this as it is an infringement of copyright.

As an owner of a legally bought copy of MW2, I felt cheated when all the shortcomings and blatant destruction of functionality became evident.
So for informational purposes I`m posting this as my take on what alteriw.net is and does.


You might argue this is to little too late when Blackops is just around the corner, but the fine people of alteriw.net has finally cracked it.

For those who has been longing for dedicated servers it seemed that folks behind teknogods, with some history of reverse engineering would be first to do this, but their project did not pan out.

http://alteriw.net/started out as an alternative server to Infinity ward`s "IWnet", in the sense that you could download a copy of MW2, and authenticate not towards IWnet, but towards their own server.

This meant no CD checks, allowing you to play even if you did not not legally own the game.
( although you could use your legal game files to connect to alter IWnet, they where just not interoperable)

The big upside to alteriw.net that turned even many who had bought a copy over to this server, was the fact that you got console access, granted not in game, but you could alt-Tab out of the game to enter console commands into the same windows as an dedicated COD 4 server uses.

This made it possible to to alter your configuration like so may of us wanted,
in terms of field of view, max fps, numeric ping values, maximum players and so on and so forth.

An added bonus was that even though alteriwnet community for the most part consisted of people being banned from IWnet by VAC, it did have in-game admins ( alterIwnet staff) and a possibility to record cheaters and request a ban via the webpage.

It was also possible for everyone (with some knowledge of console commands) to become host and set up their own mods and game rules, i.e they were full admins of their own parties, people could connect directly to them and some as former game administrators did this very well.

The latest development is the addition of dedicated servers where you could launch a headless server ( no game GUI) that validates against alteriwnet and runs in parallel to the peer 2 peer system. As I'm writing this there are over 100 servers running, most of those 24-7.
At the same time its almost 6000 people playing via the lobby system.

The server list in presented on the website: http://alteriw.net/dedicated.php - Click on a server to connect.

Edit: Now they have built in an serverbrowser into the GUI. These guys keeps impressing:

http://img573.imageshack.us/i/44271008.jpg

This means we can have servers that is local in terms of geography, with good ping and in-game admins keeping the trash out. ( you mileage may vary)

It also means that anyone with access to the hardware and internet connection are free to set up their own dedicated server, as it should have been in the first place.

Feel free to ask any questions, and ill try to answer to the best of my ability, but its worth mentioning that I`m not affiliated with alteriw.net in any way,

.....although i do run a little SnD server there

Cheers,

Rune aka RuneRuler aka mk`Run

To me this is great news. I used it today at a monthly LAN party.

We've been playing private matches on IW all year but now we can rank up.

I would've thought this would be bigger news but I guess MW2 has lost interest with the handling of IWnet and the upcoming BlOps.

EDIT:
Actually, I have a question. My sabotage games don't configure rightly. If I put a score limit setting I get that gaining ground points/second build up. What I wanted was best of 3 rounds. You know how to write that into the cfg?

While I'm at it, my SnD games have unlimited spawns. I wasn't able to set that to 1 life only. Can you enlighten me?

I don't play sabotage, so I'm not to sure about config on those, but one life in SnD is:

set scr_sd_numlives "1"


copy paste of a sample config from sabotage under, with description, maybe this helps?

set scr_sab_scorelimit "1"
set scr_sab_timelimit "2.5" // Timelimit, in minutes
set scr_sab_hotpotato "0" // Hot potato mode

set scr_sab_playerrespawndelay "-1" // -1 is no respawn delay, 0 is automatic, > 0 is X seconds
set scr_sab_waverespawndelay "0" // Wave spawning, might be more 'tactical'

set scr_sab_numlives "1" // Number of lives
set scr_sab_promode "0" // Adds a "pro" sound to the game announcement

set scr_sab_roundlimit "1" // Maximum amount of rounds, 0 is 'until someone wins'
set scr_sab_winlimit "1" // Amount of wins needed to win a round-based game
set scr_sab_roundswitch "1" // After X rounds, switch sides?

set scr_sab_bombtimer "45"
set scr_sab_defusetime "5"
set scr_sab_multibomb "0" // Allow multiple people to 'have the bomb'?
set scr_sab_planttime "5"