]>
You now rarely see a vanilla server these days; and running a vanilla server requires a lot more effort. There are plenty of mods out there today that allow server admins to make tweaks and changed to the game, and allow for easy admining. Almost all run off the back of a thing called MetaMod - this is a different Game DLL that will allow additional plugins to be loaded into the game.
Admin Mod, AMX mod and HL Guard are examples of the some of the more popular mods. This guide will detail how to add AMX mod (with some of it's own plugins) onto a Linux or Win32 server.
Please view my server guide on how to initially setup a HLDS.
During this guide we will presume that your HLDS base/root installation is located at either /home/hlds_l/ or C:\HLDS\ if on Win32 and will herein be referred to as <HLDS>. Please also note when using Linux directories should be seperated by a / and for Win32 you should use \. I will use /
www.metamod.org
The first thing that needs to be installed is MetaMod. You will need to be sure to download the latest version for your platform. The files should be laid out like this:
<HLDS>/cstrike/addons/metamod/dlls/metamod_i386.so - linux shared object
<HLDS>/cstrike/addons/metamod/dlls/metamod.dll - win32 dynamic link library
<HLDS>/cstrike/addons/metamod/plugins.ini - plugin file
Metamod is very simple to setup, just extract the files into their correct directories (see above). You do not need both the metamod_i386.so and metamod.dll. They both do the same thing, the former works on Linux only; the latter on Win32 only.
There are two methods of loading this mod. The easiest is with a command line argument which was added to HLDS in February 2004. You will need to specify '-dll <game dll>. For example:
hlds_run -game cstrike -dll addons/metamod/dlls/metamod_i386.so +maxplayers 8 +map de_dust
The tried and tested method is to edit your "liblist.gam" file, which will be located in your game directory (e.g. <HLDS>/cstrike/liblist.gam). In this file there are two lines; 'gamedll' and 'gamedll_linux'. You can specify what dll to load here, although some people have trouble with this staying on Steam platforms. Yours should look like:
gamedll "addons\metamod\dlls\metamod.dll"
gamedll_linux "addons/metamod/dlls/metamod_1386.so"
That is all there is to setting up Metamod. Now, adding mods.
Mods will more than likely need to be configured first before adding them, and often have a .cfg file which will need to be executed on start (put exec into your server.cfg).
Place the mods inside their own directory in the addons sub-directory (which would have been created when adding metamod). For example: <HLDS>/cstrike/addons/amx/. It is all very well in adding the files into directories, but you need something to tell the HLDS to load the mod. To do this we have to open the "plugins.ini" file which will be in your addons/metamod folder. Inside this we can specify objects to load on start. Some mods require more than one entry to be placed. Yours should look something like this:
win32 addons\amx\dlls\amx_mm_i386.so
linux addons/amx/dlls/amx_mm.dll
win32 addons\whatever/*.dll
linux addons/whatever/*.dll
Now, providing your mods are setup correctly this should work.