2021 Setup Guide

Not yet live

Headers

I am using...

• Windows
• Linux

I want to...

• Play solo on the same machine I host on
• Play just on my own home network (no internet players)
• Run a public server (on the internet)
• Run a public server (on the internet) for many people

I want to host...

• On my machine
• On a different machine
• On a cloud-based instance

Introductory Content

• Get the prerequisites
• Set up the database
• Modify my configuration
• Build the server
• Configure my network (port forwarding etc.)
• Running the server

Basic Content

• Logging
• Monitoring
• Guide to GM-ing

Advanced Content

• Client version support
• Maintenance
• Upgrades
• Automation
• Performance
• Large-scale hosting

Large-scale hosting

TODO: Collect more information from servers

A lot of these notes are anecdotal, but they come from successful servers hosting large amounts of players (up to 1000 concurrent), and from people who have been in the community a long time.

The game server is essentially single-threaded. So on its own, it isn't able to utilize more than a thread or two. Rather than trying to re-architect the entire application to be multithreaded and introduce all of the awful and hard-to-debug problems that come with multithreaded design, it was decided that it would use interprocess-communication (IPC). IPC allows multiple processes to be spun up and for them to communicate through a central messaging system. The library we use for this is ZeroMQ:

ZeroMQ (also known as ØMQ, 0MQ, or zmq) looks like an embeddable networking library but acts like a concurrency framework. It gives you sockets that carry atomic messages across various transports like in-process, inter-process, TCP, and multicast. You can connect sockets N-to-N with patterns like fan-out, pub-sub, task distribution, and request-reply. It's fast enough to be the fabric for clustered products. Its asynchronous I/O model gives you scalable multicore applications, built as asynchronous message-processing tasks. It has a score of language APIs and runs on most operating systems.

Note

It has been observed many times that multiple map processes straight up don't work when split different machines (or split across multiple VMs). This setup results in a slew of difficult to diagnose problems and strangeness in your zones. If you want to scale to more concurrent players, you need to upgrade to a more powerful machine.