I made a program to help solo players and small groups play alone across all 225 grids much easier and on most hardware.

[ChromeSDK 41]

 

So yeah, I got the first implementation of automatic server switching down. This will probably be the same way it will work in the release version. I know there are plenty of other ways to do it, and my number one priority after I get the app out in the first place will be to find an extremely lightweight solution for automatic single server switching, for the solo players. All the other suggestions for larger groups and tracking everyone on the server are good, but in the end this is running on the same pc as the servers so we don't want to take too many resources trying to track 25 different people and constantly turning servers on and off because they moved closer to a different server (whether or not they have the intention of switching servers). I'm not saying I won't look into other things as well, just I don't want to get in too deep before I even get the app out in its first release, doing what was initially promised.

 

As for testers, I sent out invites randomly to about 10 different people who asked. I wanted to keep the test group small, but honestly, if you are just looking to get your hands on the app, its not that crazy and probably won't have many problems in testing. I am really thinking the lag time between the test and full release to everyone will be about a week. Testing should start sometime this weekend. Its less about the time it takes to make and fix the app, and more about me having the freetime to do these things.

[esditas 8]

A Dream come true

[johnnyhustler 0]

Can't wait to take a look at this. 

[Poraru 0]

Keep up the great work, look forward to the end result

[Chris P Bacon 0]

Dying to try it

[Pyrax 0]

How does your application handle bed respawn requests and fast travel? Does it recognize a bed teleport request on a sector that isn't running and then bring it up to allow the game to fulfill the request? Or does the game just treat those beds as an offline server and not let the player teleport there at all? Same question for admin "teleport to sector" commands.

[Master Kush 1]

Can't speak for the dev but  I made my own version of this app, the way I did for bed respawn and fast travel is I added a chat command e.g "/sethome e7", each player can have one home.

Each player home server stay loaded forever (if the player is online) to allow them to respawn on their bed or load the server of their choice.

The last server of each player is saved and that server stay loaded forever regardless of if the player is online or not to allow them to join the game after disconnecting.

One freeport also stay loaded forever to allow new friends to join the server.

We are 3 playing on that setup and everything works smoothly. The only problem we encountered so far is it seems the treasure bottles wont give a treasure map if it rolls a map on a closed server.

Edited January 14, 2019 by Master Kush

[Dazlarus 8]

I can't wait to try this tool. I would have asked to be part of the test group if I had heard about this sooner. I have really been enjoying the game but am unable to find any land to claim and build my base on the Official NA PvE server. My computer has an i7 4790k and 32 GB of RAM. I tended to play ARK on clustered servers off of the same machine with no troubles up to 3 servers, adding the 4th would kill performance of my game. There is a lot less going on in this game per server than ARK does, especially since my group will mainly be living off our ship with small amounts of island base building to facilitate restocking the ship and upgrading it. 

I am very keen to try this out. Can you please update the main post with a link for the download when it is ready for general consumption? I can totally see this facilitating single player and small group play for the majority of the community that is fed up with the drama around the current land claim systems. 

[AustinSgt 0]

Can I pretty please get a copy of this awesome and outstanding program? I have deployed my own dedicated server from my personal file server at home, got everything working and port forwarding, but not nearly enough memory to host 225 zones. Trying to manually condense the unique islands using grid editor or manipulating the json files is proving troublesome due to sticky coordinates. This will allow my company to just run the entire official map and make life so much easier.

 

PS - tried to find you in the Atlas discord but didnt see you there

[upperking 11]

Is it possible to have the entire map overlay and it shows which maps are on and off with a transparent green or red color?

[Kero 9]

There should be a way to make the unused servers "sleep", while they send smalls data packages, as beds, paths of NPCs etc.

[RedneckJedi 9]

Any update on this?  My friends and I are ready!

[LUC1F3R 4]

I'm curious to see disk usage on this.

 

[Dazlarus 8]

@LUC1F3R The disk usage should be low if you mean space that this would take up. You only need 1 install of the server version of the game. Everything else is handled by config and save files which are very small considering the size of the map. 

If by disk usage you mean throughput, it will be very heavy on the reads when spinning up new servers. Luckily reads wear out HDDs and SSDs slower than writes do. 

[Ian-C 2]

This is absolutely genius, and i would love to have a tool like this for managing my server. my only issue is I don't have the hardware to be able to run 5 servers, 3 is doable 4 at a push. would it be possible to have an option for manual server activation of the servers on the main server grid like on the 4 side grids, so if i was going to travel to a particular server North, South, East, or West I could just activate that server and once I left the origin server I could shut down the server behind me. 

As an idea you could have an option to stop auto server activation then manual server activation would be by clicking on a grid square to load it up, changing colour to green and clicking again would deactivate the server back to red. Using the new player tracking to centre the grid on your current location would allow for activating the next server in the required travel direction while still being able to close the server behind you.

I play with a small group of friends mainly PVE and we tend to travel around as a group, we mainly base ourselves on a ship so even if logged out we all travel together. This would be an ideal tool to allow easy server management.

[Stopitshere1 0]

Can confirm this works very well for the public release on Twitter, the servers start rapidly and unless you are in the corner of the map, they always start before you reach them.

Only a few issues I can note of that would be great to get sorted in the future for it to be perfect:

- 15x15 means all config files need to be setup, default config file doesn't work for everything (point overrides, for example, need to be done in each server folder) so unless you can turn on all servers for a second to generate the folders and then spend time copying over 225 config ini files, then you run into a big issue (and that is time-consuming, if not, impossible). Presumably, there's an easy workaround like how you easily create all bat files with a click, except by copying 2 template ini files and creating the config folders?

- Map requires to be 15x15 otherwise ports are messed up - Not bad but was a little frustrating when I spent multiple days sorting out the perfect 9x9

- Bat files open up per server meaning it pings you out the game each time you transfer, again not as bad as the config, just a small annoyance. This might be avoided by setting the game to be always on top, will have to try that tomorrow.

...And that's about it for the issues. Still very useful and I appreciate the program! 

[ChromeSDK 41]

@Stopitshere1 Thanks for the feedback! There will be a lot more configuration in v2 of the app. This one was originally made just for my use case and as I added more and more to it, I realized other people would benefit and by then it was too late to start changing things. I am going to rewrite it from scratch for v2.

Also, I made a separate release thread linked below: 

I did it with the thought that I could just close this one up to avoid confusion, but now I don't see a way to close this topic

Could maybe a mod or something close this one?

 

 

 

[flex73 3]

all works good
I make a 3x3 Cluster.

After i edit the sge save i have to configure the .bat from the clusters by myself 

Because the ports was not the same like in the Servergrid.

After then no prob

Edited January 20, 2019 by flex73