Codename Eagle Nation

Master server

A master server is the phone book of an online game: running servers announce themselves to it, and your game asks it for the list so they show up in the ingame server browser. Without one, there is no way to discover who is hosting.

The GameSpy era

When Codename Eagle shipped, it announced its multiplayer servers to the GameSpy master server at master.gamespy.com. That is how servers were listed and discovered in the ingame browser for well over a decade.

GameSpy shut down its master server service on . From that day on, the original discovery mechanism simply stopped working - servers could still be started and joined directly by IP, but nothing could list them anymore.

A replacement built for Codename Eagle

To bring server discovery back, CE Nation has written a master server replacement built specifically for Codename Eagle. It lets servers announce themselves and be found again, and it is hosted at ceservers.net.

This master server is what feeds the server list here on the site, as well as the ingame server browser in version 1.50.

Pointing the game at the new master server

There are two ways to get Codename Eagle talking to the new master server. One is quick and requires nothing more than a download; the other is a manual binary patch for the curious.

The easy way: get the 1.50 patch

The 1.50 patch/demo already ships with this change applied, so it points at the new master server out of the box - no editing required. This is the recommended route for just about everyone. Grab the 1.50 patch/demo and you are done.

The manual way: patch ce.exe yourself

If you would rather modify an existing installation by hand, you can patch the game executable directly. Inside ce.exe the hostname of the old master server is stored as a plain string; replace it with the new one:

master.gamespy.com → ceservers.net

The catch is that the replacement is written over the original string in place, so it has to fit within the space the original occupied and be null-terminated (padded with a 0x00 byte so the game knows where the string ends). Conveniently ceservers.net is shorter than master.gamespy.com, so it fits with room to spare. If in doubt, take the easy way above - the 1.50 download does exactly this for you.