Is the new Faction/fleet stuff broken on Linux?

[Nickizzy]

I have this problem as well. I can only see the trading guild and pirate factions. Also, does fog of war cloud out factions? Because I spent a good hour making a jumper ship to go out and find it.

 

[nightrune]

We had a tester try to repro on a fresh Ubuntu 16.x and couldn't repro it.

We're all of these upgrades or fresh installs?

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Mine was an upgrade from the previous StarMade version. Though I did a fresh install/reset the day before the update, I'd have waited a day had I known ahead of time.

 

[Jojomo]

Mine (working fine/correctly) was an upgrade.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and just take a guess at the root of the problem: permissions in the steam folders.

Because I have my steam install on a separate partition, and because I'm lazy and not security conscious, I just recursively chmod my steam folder and all its children to 775 or 777, so I'm guessing I have permissions for creating/copying files that many people don't. And looking at the log posted on page 1, it's when trying to copy files/folders that npcs on the server fails.

So mine works while no-one else's does

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Ugh, the annoying part for anyone wanting to fix their server if this is happening...

1. Start a server however you do (this is for a new world called world0...)
2. Shut down the server
3.

cd StarMade/server-database/world0
cp -R ../../data/npcFactions ./
mkdir npcFactions/Outcasts/blueprints
mkdir npcFactions/Scavengers/blueprints
mkdir npcFactions/Trading\ Guild/blueprints
unzip npcFactions/Outcasts/blueprints.zip -d npcFactions/Outcasts/blueprints
unzip npcFactions/Scavengers/blueprints.zip -d npcFactions/Scavengers/blueprints
unzip npcFactions/Trading\ Guild/blueprints.zip -d npcFactions/Trading\ Guild/blueprints

4. Restart the server

Doing this seems to have fixed NPC Factions on my server.

One thing I noticed was unzip was not even installed on my server (Ubuntu 16.04 Server, bare-bones command-line install only). So maybe this step failed during initial world creation because of missing dependencies.

 

[AndyP]

The testserver never had issues with updating the map and extracting the files.

So missing zip support could be a reason.
However, to my knowledge:
"java.util.zip"
should work on every system.
And this is (as far as I know) used to extract the files.

Not sure if a missing installed "unzip/zlib" could make the java.util.zip fail to operate.
Unless java.util.zip uses the unzip command behind the scenes.
(And this works from my experience on all operating systems with the same format and arguments)

- Andy

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Oracle's documentation on java.util.zip doesn't make any mention of any required system utilities for it to work. But their documentation seems horribly-formatted so maybe I missed something.

If I have time tonight, I'll spawn up a fresh Ubuntu Server VM and install unzip before starting a StarMade server, just to confirm or deny that this is the problem.

 

[nightrune]

Oracle's documentation on java.util.zip doesn't make any mention of any required system utilities for it to work. But their documentation seems horribly-formatted so maybe I missed something.

If I have time tonight, I'll spawn up a fresh Ubuntu Server VM and install unzip before starting a StarMade server, just to confirm or deny that this is the problem.

Start with a fresh server and see if it fails first please. Then install unzip and see if it fixes it! That should be a pretty good definitive.

 

[AndyP]

Great, that would be helpful.
And good to know.

- Andy

 

[Andir]

I had unzip installed previously. I did not install anything new or unusual between the normal server setup and running the commands manually.

I normally run starmade in a screen session, but I did try manually running the Linux dedicated script with no difference.

The server is a Debian (Stretch) server running in a VM which I gave:
6 Core (AMD Opteron)
16 GB RAM
10 GB Disk space

I created a user for starmade (called 'starmade') and ran the new installer in the home directory.

I both run the server and the above move commands as the starmade user (so I assume it was not rights related)

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Okay, just did some testing with fresh Ubuntu Server 16.04 server VMs and I was unable to reproduce this. One VM had unzip installed (and unzip dependencies) and the other did not. Both had NPC Factions when I joined.

It could be something with the upgrade from the previous version then, and not with fresh installs of the current version.

 

[DukeofRealms]

and because I'm lazy and not security conscious, I just recursively chmod my steam folder and all its children to 775 or 777

Please, please, please don't do this. 1 million innocent puppies die every time you set 777 perms.

 

[Jojomo]

Please, please, please don't do this. 1 million innocent puppies die every time you set 777 perms.

Haha, yes, I don't advocate anyone doing this, it's just that I knew I'd done it and assumed others hadn't, so my guess (apparently wrong anyway) was that it could be exposing the reason I was having no trouble while others were.

 

[nightrune]

Has anyone else had this problem?

Here is the bug ticket
T2108 NPC Assets fail to copy into world

We've failed to repro this so far. Its possible its an isolated case, but I'd like to know the cause.

 

[Jojomo]

Has anyone else had this problem?

Here is the bug ticket
T2108 NPC Assets fail to copy into world

We've failed to repro this so far. Its possible its an isolated case, but I'd like to know the cause.

The description is too brief for an outsider (well, me anyway) to understand what is being described, and the log can't be opened by anyone not logged into phabricator.

 

[SmilingDemon]

it just describes the fact that some people had seen universes after the NPC update that did not contain the new factions.
so far only happend to linux systems afaik.
the npc assets do not get copied into the proper folders on setup or conversion of a universe.
afaik no known way to reproduce that effect.

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

The description is too brief for an outsider (well, me anyway) to understand what is being described

In short, when the game makes a new world, it un-packs the data needed from several locations. Somtimes this is actually copying the information, others it is actually un-packing it. (.zip and .rar files)

The problem is, sometimes, despite having permission and space to do so, the files fail to copy. (this could be a "filename too long" type error, or could be something else equally stupid)
The result is, NPC factions will not spawn for that world, untill someone with direct file access manually copies them into the correct locations.
(which somehow works, when the automated system failed)

EDIT: good one SmilingDemon, ya beat me to it.

 

[Jojomo]

it just describes the fact that some people had seen universes after the NPC update that did not contain the new factions.

The result is, NPC factions will not spawn for that world, untill someone with direct file access manually copies them into the correct locations.
(which somehow works, when the automated system failed)

Oh ok, sorry, same issue that was being discussed previously, not a new one.
I'm not seeing this at all, I've had no trouble.

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

Only one server I've been on had encountered it, and it was literally the day after they had switched to a physical Linux server box rather than a virtualized Win-10 server.

It may have been a result of his unfamiliarity with Starmade servers, or from setting it up on Linux (which he allso wasn't too familiar with.)

 

[kikaha]

it just describes the fact that some people had seen universes after the NPC update that did not contain the new factions.
so far only happend to linux systems afaik.
the npc assets do not get copied into the proper folders on setup or conversion of a universe.
afaik no known way to reproduce that effect.

Same happened to me, no new factions even after creating new universe.

had to do a clean fresh install to see the new faction. Running on linux ubuntu 14.04.