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Hello,

More of an inquiry than anything else. Is there a plan to build a dedicated server that can support the full map (225x225) intended for small group LAN play?

My understanding as of now is that Id need to host grids even if we were never to visit them, making it virtually an impossible task to achieve the above. 

Non dedicated is possible but then we can only play when host is on, plus tethering nonsense. 

I have tooled around with the advertised server controller - the heart of my question is if something like that will be properly packed into a dedi server tool at some point in the future?

While I have purchased the game to test, my wife and some friends are holding off until we can get to the bottom of this. 

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Unless I'm mistaken the official map is 15x15, or 225 grids, not 255x255.

You don't need the entire map to have a good time, but you probably want more than 1 or 2 grids to experience everything that atlas has. Personal I think a 5x5 can do everything. Keep in mind you don't have to have all of the servers on at the same time, just don't shut off a server if someone logged out in it, or turn it back on before they try to log in.

I'm working on setting up a server for a few of my friends and I think we're going to go with a 5x5. Middle 9 are going to be always on, the outer 16 are going to be started and stopped as needed. Middle 9 are normal grids in the different biomes and one free-port, outer 16 are the end game content and a few extra grids.

You could setup the entire 15x15 grid if you want and just start and stop the grids as needed. The file is available for download in their git repo.

LAN play is a little more difficult. To transitions between servers you need access from the internet, it's dumb, but that's the way it seems to be right now. You can get away with NAT loop-back or hair-pinning, and put a password on the server for good measure.

 

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5 hours ago, MeatShield said:

Unless I'm mistaken the official map is 15x15, or 225 grids, not 255x255.

You don't need the entire map to have a good time, but you probably want more than 1 or 2 grids to experience everything that atlas has. Personal I think a 5x5 can do everything. Keep in mind you don't have to have all of the servers on at the same time, just don't shut off a server if someone logged out in it, or turn it back on before they try to log in.

I'm working on setting up a server for a few of my friends and I think we're going to go with a 5x5. Middle 9 are going to be always on, the outer 16 are going to be started and stopped as needed. Middle 9 are normal grids in the different biomes and one free-port, outer 16 are the end game content and a few extra grids.

You could setup the entire 15x15 grid if you want and just start and stop the grids as needed. The file is available for download in their git repo.

LAN play is a little more difficult. To transitions between servers you need access from the internet, it's dumb, but that's the way it seems to be right now. You can get away with NAT loop-back or hair-pinning, and put a password on the server for good measure.

I can't imagine that most people are going to want to deal with turning servers on and off as needed. What is needed is a tool that would do that automatically. Before single player was created, someone had created a tool to do just that. The thread for it is here:

This had some problems that I don't think were ever resolved. For instance, the treasure map grid is determined when you add the map to your inventory. I think it required the servers to be running to assign a location in a grid, so if the server was not running, the map would not work. No new messages in the thread in months, so possibly it is no longer supported?

Possibly you have resolved the map problem by keeping the 3 x 3 center grids always on?

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I was working on writing a python script to manage turning servers on and off as I traveled, but I ran into a few issues and it's not really practical unless you already have a beefy server to begin with and then you should probably just go with a 3x3 to 5x5 ish.

Unfortunately all of the python libraries for rcon are apparently broken, so I have to write my own. Beyond that issue you need to track every player and there's no good way to do that yet. As of now all I can get is the server grid if they are logged in. If a player logs out and you shut the server off, they can't log in, so you need to track where players log off and keep them up. So you're limited pretty quickly if people split up. One of the other issues I was running into was the CPU usage on starting grids. Starting a grid pegs a CPU at 100%, if you're trying to keep all grids that are adjacent to players up, as soon as a player leaves a grid you need to start 3 grids and possibly shuts down 2, that's 3 cores pegged at 100%, and 2 more being used to save. if 2 players move in opposite directions at the same time, that's 6. The host I am running on has access to 8 cores of my 3700x and 32 gigs of memory and I was able to grind it to a halt while testing with cheat fly and some worst case pathing. Any one player can require 5 grids to be on, hopefully people stay close to each other, but the worst case gets messy really quick. If they ever get the Linux binaries working I'll take another look, I'll have more resources and a better environment to work in.

 

The 8 cores can run 12 servers just fine. So I figure leave 9 on and if we want to go to a golden ruin we start one or 2 up and head out.

 

As for the treasure map, my testing was consistent with only the currently up servers being on treasure maps.

 

 

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Yes, I downloaded that tool and was able to get it working. Noy done testing yet.

It is... a real PIA however. As I learn more about how the game works I am really befuddled by the architecture of the game. Seems like a *LOT* of wasted resources going to load assets / logic that no one is around to experience. 

I'm not even clear why the game needs to load one entire grid. Why not just load what I can see as the player? Then the map cpuld be procedurally infinite if scale is what they were looking for. 

Unfortunately my wife still hasn't purchased as we are cautious of all this overhead bugging out the experience. 

Interesting stuff. Really surprised by this. If I were to play on official and logged out of a chunk that is later offline, I am SOL?

Looks like an improvement over ark in most ways, but I think I am going to stop wssting time trying with the server stuff and wait to see if theres improvement in all this on release I guess

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5 minutes ago, Royerrulz said:

Yes, I downloaded that tool and was able to get it working. Noy done testing yet.

It is... a real PIA however. As I learn more about how the game works I am really befuddled by the architecture of the game. Seems like a *LOT* of wasted resources going to load assets / logic that no one is around to experience. 

I'm not even clear why the game needs to load one entire grid. Why not just load what I can see as the player? Then the map cpuld be procedurally infinite if scale is what they were looking for. 

Unfortunately my wife still hasn't purchased as we are cautious of all this overhead bugging out the experience. 

Interesting stuff. Really surprised by this. If I were to play on official and logged out of a chunk that is later offline, I am SOL?

Looks like an improvement over ark in most ways, but I think I am going to stop wssting time trying with the server stuff and wait to see if theres improvement in all this on release I guess

I haven't played with running any servers myself, closest I came was running non-dedicated once with my wife. For the official servers, they keep all 225 grids running as close to 24x7 as possible. I don't play those, but on private servers if a grid is down, and that is where you logged out, you just have to wait for it to come up to get back into the game.

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3 hours ago, Royerrulz said:

Yes, I downloaded that tool and was able to get it working. Noy done testing yet.

It is... a real PIA however. As I learn more about how the game works I am really befuddled by the architecture of the game. Seems like a *LOT* of wasted resources going to load assets / logic that no one is around to experience. 

I'm not even clear why the game needs to load one entire grid. Why not just load what I can see as the player? Then the map cpuld be procedurally infinite if scale is what they were looking for. 

Unfortunately my wife still hasn't purchased as we are cautious of all this overhead bugging out the experience. 

Interesting stuff. Really surprised by this. If I were to play on official and logged out of a chunk that is later offline, I am SOL?

Looks like an improvement over ark in most ways, but I think I am going to stop wssting time trying with the server stuff and wait to see if theres improvement in all this on release I guess

I managed an Ark cluster for a few years so Atlas isn't that big of a leap for me. Biggest issue so far is the Linux binaries are broken so I have to all this under a windows VM. A lot of the things that are trivial under Linux are a serious PITA on windows.

You can't really have an infinite procedural world that can be traversed like you want and have a ton of users. The issue is dividing up the processing and some things don't parallelize easily, or at all. The easiest way to do this is to setup discrete chunks like Atlas. When you try to cram tons of people into the same space it becomes incredibly complex to keep everything in sync, especially for an FPS. The only FPS game I know of that does this sort of scale is Planetside 2. Amazing game, I know it has bugs but it is really a marvel of programing that it works as well as it does. They wrote a custom engine specifically designed to tackle those issues. Long story short, you have to quantize the world for performance.

 

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