New "Game Server" Oceanic

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    Hi, Id like to just let everyone know about my server.

    mindcrush.ddns.net:4242

    Its a Oceanic server, and still needing upgrades as I learn just how intensive this game server can be.

    The main reason i've made a server, Is because starmade seems to lack the "Game" of most games.

    Design is cool, sharing, when your as good as half of you all is Epic, But ive personally found gameplay Lacking. I want to shoot people.....

    Though i can on over servers, finding people for PvP.... Kinda hard.

    So I thought... why is starmade so different than all the other games, and i concluded, Because you have total, unfetted freedom of direction.

    My vision is to keep that freedom, but to make "funneled" travel as much of the game as i can.

    My current method is by increasing sector size to 40km, reducing ship max speed, but building a long tedious warpgate network, somewhat like "Freelancer"

    As the warpgates have a max size, I can "Shape" the ships (Also providing appropriate sized shipyards to encourage correctly sized ships)

    Im hoping to find a way to disengage warpgates, but not sure if its possible, something like....
    monitor shields
    if Shields < 50%
    Warpgate Offline

    and very low regen, sure there will be greifers.... but oh well, with the old cap system, draining the gates would have been viable.

    To me this system gives more options for gameplay, You can choose to be a pirate, and sit between a heavy used gate lane to attack unsuspecting travelers...

    Restricting the "Shop Spawn" and making stations dedicated to specific production.

    refineries for ore.

    Im keen for any other suggestions. Or comments, or assistance.

    But there it is, my server, my plans.

    Oh, and this doesn't make super carriers unviable, it just means they cruise space, while smaller ships can navigate with a certain amount of haste.

    Also due to warp gate limits, it limits ships weapons ect that can fit through the gate. Oceanic.png
     
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    Glad to here of another server!
    Sound like you've chosen your Task (direction)!
    Interesting Concepts!
    40km sektors is beyond the recommended size, but interesting...

    Please do keep us Updated of Progress, I am interested in hearing how it goes...
    Be sure tobring some patience, and time... not much going on, on public servers...

    Good luck dude!

    TSN
     
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    Glad to here of another server!
    Sound like you've chosen your Task (direction)!
    Interesting Concepts!
    40km sektors is beyond the recommended size, but interesting...

    Please do keep us Updated of Progress, I am interested in hearing how it goes...
    Be sure tobring some patience, and time... not much going on, on public servers...

    Good luck dude!

    TSN

    I did look into sector size, and have been playing around with it for a couple of months before settling on 40, at 80, i was having problems, at 60 it seemed stable. so I finally settled on 40, to be safe...... (Hopefully) but thanks for pointing that out :)

    I noticed the drop off, and started losing my passion for playing, that and the terrible server admins i encountered who kept wanting to kick me off servers because I played with the kids (They had same IP)

    Since everything seems quiet, I decided I had plenty of time to get something stable, Ive already had to chop and change the server twice, and had a tonne of downtime. Thats why i didn't announce server earlier.

    Ive only managed to get 10 friends (And kids) playing at one time so far, but it seems to be stable , and hasn't gone down for 3 weeks now.

    Still NEED to install SSD's when i get time, and i will probably replace RAM to 64 gig, though the server info page i read said they were supporting 100 players on 8 gig.... I can't support 100 players on 16 gig (Settings maybe?)

    My Quad CPU server board, running 4x quad cores and 8 gig of ram really didn't do the job, which is odd, I built a single CPU quad core, and it seems to be performing better?

    Though now I can't run a Raid 60 setup with the new system. So i really need those SSD's lol

    Speaking of which, anyone ever tried those ali-express ones, they are 1/4 of the price that i can buy in New Zealand (King Drives)
     
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    I did look into sector size, and have been playing around with it for a couple of months before settling on 40, at 80, i was having problems, at 60 it seemed stable. so I finally settled on 40, to be safe...... (Hopefully) but thanks for pointing that out :)

    I noticed the drop off, and started losing my passion for playing, that and the terrible server admins i encountered who kept wanting to kick me off servers because I played with the kids (They had same IP)

    Since everything seems quiet, I decided I had plenty of time to get something stable, Ive already had to chop and change the server twice, and had a tonne of downtime. Thats why i didn't announce server earlier.

    Ive only managed to get 10 friends (And kids) playing at one time so far, but it seems to be stable , and hasn't gone down for 3 weeks now.

    Still NEED to install SSD's when i get time, and i will probably replace RAM to 64 gig, though the server info page i read said they were supporting 100 players on 8 gig.... I can't support 100 players on 16 gig (Settings maybe?)

    My Quad CPU server board, running 4x quad cores and 8 gig of ram really didn't do the job, which is odd, I built a single CPU quad core, and it seems to be performing better?

    Though now I can't run a Raid 60 setup with the new system. So i really need those SSD's lol

    Speaking of which, anyone ever tried those ali-express ones, they are 1/4 of the price that i can buy in New Zealand (King Drives)
    It's not how many cores you have it's how fast they are. The GHz matters. If you got a 2G 16 core it'll get whipped by a 4G 4 core. Just watch you CPU usage in something like Htop (linux yes?) while it's running, you'll only ever see one core working at a time. Also if you have lots of RAM you don't really need fast hard drives /SSDs. You can mount the entire game into RAM and that makes hard drive access speeds irrelevant. I have a few scripts to do this for my server, the RAM drive is synced every 3 minutes using rsync with the data on the hard drive. This means if there's an unexpected shutdown you'll only lose max 3 mins play time. Java tends to use what it's given so seeing high RAM usage doesn't necessarily mean it needs it all. 16Gigs should be enough for all but the really heavy usage servers. 32 Gigs would be more then needed... 64 is just total overkill. In game performance is much more to do with CPU speed then anything else.
    I'm happy to share my scripts for mounting and copying to a RAM drive if you're interested? It's not particularly complicated, years ago I copied a how to for a Minecraft server that's floating around online, and have since used it for a number of different servers. It's really the way to go if you've got the RAM to spare, forget about expensive hard drives... ;)
     
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    the quad quad core was far superior (I used one of its processors for what the server is currently running ) I hazard a guess the server couldn't deal with my board, or the 4 processors, I've had such problems before. Yes please to RAM scripts. I don't trust SSD's (They are not designed for huge read write operational lifetime) I can replace ram super cheap :)
     
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    the quad quad core was far superior (I used one of its processors for what the server is currently running ) I hazard a guess the server couldn't deal with my board, or the 4 processors, I've had such problems before. Yes please to RAM scripts. I don't trust SSD's (They are not designed for huge read write operational lifetime) I can replace ram super cheap :)
    I started a response/how-to but it got rather long so I started a separate thread here.
    Hope it is legible and helps some. :)
     
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    Server has been having some stability issues, Have spent the evening moving it to yet a different box. maybe this is related to my large sector size. I can't find any logs to tell me why its crashing. any ideas would be appreciated :)
     
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    i my experience it is usually the lack of memory. check the java parameter in your runscript (e.g. starmade-dedictated-linux-something.sh).
    they should look like "java -Xms256m -Xmx2048m ...". change the latter to 8196m for 8GB of RAM or more.
     
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    " Xmx8G " works on modern systems, no need for the m equivalent.
    just a small tip*
     
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    i my experience it is usually the lack of memory. check the java parameter in your runscript (e.g. starmade-dedictated-linux-something.sh).
    they should look like "java -Xms256m -Xmx2048m ...". change the latter to 8196m for 8GB of RAM or more.
    Thanks, though I don't think that was the issue, I am curious, from my understanding that's the java heap size and the game still utilises any ram it needs?

    I do think I figured out the issue. I was running my scripts as root, but the permissions of one of my scripts had not been set, so when the scripts were accessed by cron, it was not executing. Also, I didn't send output to /dev/null and this was creating actual crashes as my server complete output was filling my root mail.

    Also I wasn't using screen so what I was doing from ssh was exiting when I did.

    However, I have a problem with huge NPC spawn (we are talking 50+ in sectors where people play.

    In config I have turned it down to 6, but the server still spawns huge amounts.

    I don't want to turn npc spawn off (I want trading... And something to shoot) also I like that they mine, creating some diversity.

    Anyone know of a way to stem the influx of npc?
     
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    I think the main problem may be the new settings not taking effect on an existing world...

    Xmx is allocated RAM

    Have you tried reducing:
    CONCURRENT_SIMULATION = 256 //How many simulation groups may be in the universe simultaniously (performance)


    I use a value of 8.

    you may need to start a new world, not sure.

    you can also increase the time between spawns:

    SIMULATION_SPAWN_DELAY = 720 //How much seconds between simulation spawn ticks
     
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    I have concurrent at 4
    My spawn delay was 420

    I have set it to 720 and see if it makes a difference, Thank you for your suggestion.

    So far, now correct permissions have been given to jobs, the server has remained stable! two days and counting lol
     
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    I've got a player that i think is stuck somewhere, when they login, the server stalls for 20 seconds and they D/C
    There is a brief flash of what sector is the issue, but i never seem to catch it.
    A bunch of connection failure messages throw it off my screen, is there a way to find it in some form of log? I have searched the logs, but so far can't find anything useful.
     
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    I've got a player that i think is stuck somewhere, when they login, the server stalls for 20 seconds and they D/C
    There is a brief flash of what sector is the issue, but i never seem to catch it.
    A bunch of connection failure messages throw it off my screen, is there a way to find it in some form of log? I have searched the logs, but so far can't find anything useful.
    Use grep.
    `grep -i connect serverlog.0.log` will give you all the connection and disconnection details.
    `grep -i PlayerName logstarmade.0.log` will give you all references to the player.
    Should be able to find the sector details from that.
     
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    I did open the server log, and can see him connect and disconnect, but I cant locate where he is (Sector) to see why he is crashing out)

    I just used nano. Ill try grep.
     
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    I did open the server log, and can see him connect and disconnect, but I cant locate where he is (Sector) to see why he is crashing out)

    I just used nano. Ill try grep.
    `grep -i playerstate logstarmade.0.log | grep -i sector | grep -i PlayerName`

    And if you've got his name do an in game search on it, `/search PlayerName` likely as not you'll find a core or two at least and be able to see where they are.
     

    Lone_Puppy

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    This is a great thread! Looking forward to following your progress.