Before positing here, please read the introduction post first.

Choosing your Weapons
When running a GSP, you are going to need some software to control your servers, customers, billing, orders, payments and eventually to allow your users configuring their servers ingame. I have been testing a few control pannels and I currently have found none wich reflects my need while some could still do the trick. As I explained in the introduction, I would suggest you either to use an existing tool and to adapt it to suit your need or, take some more time to develop (or have it done) your own tool or set of tools which would indeed be pretty more precise but may cost alot of time and thinking. As I only plan to run CS:S initially, my choice will be to develop our own cpanel as I am unsatisfied by many aspects of those existing and as I really pay much importance to the simplicity and power of such a tool for both yourself and for your customers.

Control Panels
Well CPanels are some of the most important tools a GSP can use so I think it is essential that you choose a good one that perfectly suits your needs. OMHO, the basic aims of a cpanel is to install, configure and run srcds and uts plugins, to manage users (admins) and files on the server (maps, skins), to display network, slots and game usage, to backup config and custom files and finally, to interface with the other administration tools such as voice, website or mail servers. Also, it must be really simple to understand and to be used. On the side, if any one could provide the post with some pros and cons about GameCP, TCAdmin, brainless or any other (free or not), it would be apreciated.

Customer & Billing Management
I actually don't know of any tool to manage game server customers. I've been using cc solutions and other means available in my country to charge my customers and I usually store their information on a custom application but I am sure that there are a few solutions that integrates many different payment platforms and at the same time allow managing your customers. Please let me know if you guys know any kind of tool like it that is worth.

This post was last modified: 04-09-2008 08:10 AM by kaine.

clientexec.com

rawr to ClientExec, I personally hate that software, lol. I actually like ModernBill as far as billing goes. ModernBill seems to have a lot more functionality than ClientExec. I know ModernBill is pretty stable as well, as its handling some 30000+ active customers.

As far as game control panels. We use TCAdmin. I think it has a ton of functionality, it lacks in some areas. It handles game updates pretty smoothly though, and it monitors system resources and stuff like that. Its all pretty nice. The only thing is its strictly windows based. Even the master server is IIS with mysql. The only way we could get any sort of decent performance out of the website portion is to run the mysql database on a separate nix box, and the IIS box is a core2duo. We suspect even still before to long, we are going to have to up that to a core2quad, or xeon or something.

Really you hate clientexec? Lol I actually hate Modernbill . Dont like their support team but maybe since they got bough by another company (Right they did? Or am I going crazy lol) I would probably try them again. Yeah TCadmin is really usage intesive. UGCC is really light btw. There is another control panel, infernocp.com which I saw in someone's signature at WHT and I am waiting for it to come out and test it .

well our version of modernbill is pretty old.. and not really default anymore.. lol. Haven't had support for it for some time now. ClientExec though.. we use it for something else.. and kind of our moto for that is.. "ClientExec, doesn't have that feature" lol. Different story though.. may have to look into UGCC.. don't know if we will switch over or not, but it would be worth testing. Do you have a link to UGCC.. can't find squat on it.. lol.

its masher control panel lol. brainless.us. It doesnt have the features of tcadmin but its great for clans and small gsp's. Its customizable to the extreme as well.

hmm.. may have to look into that.. if its easy to customize by be something for our developers to look into. We have considered coding our own, but it takes soo much, but if theres a base already done.. hmmm

Yeah thats why I like it

Anyone know of any free programs like modernbill, or clientexec? Trying to find me a free one maybe for linux.

I found this old discontinued billing project, it's called SolidState I think...